The prehistoric elephant site

I joined Mastodon last week. I’m on some random server on the “fediverse” and the place is both completely different from Twitter and oddly familiar. More experienced users (it’s been around for a few years but most people never heard of it until the genius billionaire took over Twitter) are likening migration to Mastodon as a move to a new city - it seems overwhelming at first, but just take your time and explore and you’ll be at home in no time. And I do feel quite at home there now, but it’s not like a new city at all. It’s more like a countryside filled with villages, most rather charming but some less so, versus the sprawling monolithic metropolis that is Twitter. 

It took me some time to set up my account. I couldn’t upload photos for my profile avatar and header, which I first thought was user error but then came to understand was a result of latency arising from a huge influx of traffic on the Mastodon servers. There are a lot of people moving although I take issue with new Mastodon arrivals calling themselves “refugees” from the Twitter warzone. Given the number of actual refugees fleeing terrible places and clamoring to enter new places that mostly want nothing to do with them, this metaphor seems rather stupid and solipsistic. So I guess it tracks. 

*****

I joined Twitter in 2008. I was, uncharacteristically, a relatively early adopter. I say “uncharacteristically” because I’m usually the very last to pick up on a trend. I’m the one chasing the bandwagon long after it departs and moves on to pick up the early adopters of the next hot trend. But I was right on time with Twitter. Not the leading edge necessarily, but not late to the party either. 

At first, I really liked Twitter. I had a blog (still have it, as  you can see), and I used to have quite a few readers. They followed me on Twitter, I followed them back, I followed their friends and followers, and they followed mine, and we all shared our writing and posted pithy little jokes and comments. When I started on the hellsite, Twitter still supported only 140-character posts. I don’t remember when I saw my first thread; maybe around 2010 or so? You couldn’t post pictures or videos, and I don’t remember that there were any ads, either. The whole point of it was “what are you doing?” - 140 characters all about what you’re doing at that moment. Watching a movie? Walking around Manhattan during a snowstorm? Boarding a plane? Eating a snack? Getting married? Changing a baby’s diaper? Robbing a bank? Going to work? Going home from work? Any or all of it, from the mundane to the dramatic, was Twitter-worthy. Just write a very short and ideally funny or touching or thoughtful comment about what you’re doing at that moment, post it, and wait for people to react. And of course, read and react to everyone else’s funny, touching, or thoughtful observations about their daily lives. 

I tweeted on and off for a few years, and even made some friends. Then at some point, the combination of work, school (I was an adult student then, God help me), young children, PTA, swim team and baseball and school concerts and compulsive housekeeping made blogging and tweeting completely unsustainable, and so I stopped, pretty much cold turkey. I started blogging again, sporadically, in 2015 or so, but I didn’t go anywhere near Twitter again until years later.

Right in the middle of the pandemic year of our Lord 2020, with too much time on my hands, I installed the app on my phone (I didn’t even have a smartphone when I first joined Twitter in 2008 - practically no one did), logged back in, and found that I barely recognized the place. I avoided Trump, of course, but he still dominated the discourse - it was also an election year and most people on Twitter were reacting to him in one way or another. And a few huge accounts with tens of thousands of followers controlled everything else. Comment threads were either orgies of OMG-you’re-so-amazing fandom or delete-your-account pile-ons, sometimes (often) over the most innocuous things. It was entertaining sometimes but it wasn’t congenial. It wasn’t good for anyone’s mental health. 

*****

Just before I stepped away from Twitter for the first time, in 2013 or so, a mutual invited me to an “Elf” Twitter watch party. The host made up a hashtag for the watch party, asked everyone to start the movie at 8 PM, watch with family and friends, and live tweet their comments and jokes and reactions, using the party hashtag. 

It was HILARIOUS. The group was mostly (but not all) mothers with young and school-age children, so many of the tweets were about our kids' comments and reactions to the movie. During the breakfast scene, my youngest, who was 7 or 8 (so this must have been around 2012), said “He’s going to get dia-beet-ee-us.” My sons tried to recreate the Santa and Buddy fight scene. My older son took a flying leap at the tree to put a star on top. I tweeted about all of this, to the great amusement of the party attendees. During the mailroom scene, I tweeted “That’s the oldest-looking 26-year-old I’ve ever seen. Sunscreen. Antioxidants. SOMETHING.” About 35 people liked and commented on that tweet - probably my best tweet ever in terms of sheer numbers.

The thing about 2013 is that it wasn’t that long ago. Less than a decade. Of course, Donald Trump existed - he was very famous and had been for years. And I’m sure that he was on Twitter then, too - I think that the whole Barack Obama “birther” controversy started on Twitter. But no serious person took him seriously. You could follow him and read his stupid tweets if you liked that sort of thing but most of us on Twitter were there for fun. Most of us were there to try to make each other laugh while we watched “Elf” with our kids. Those were the days, I tell you what. 

*****

Mastodon is a quieter place, at least so far. It kind of reminds me of old Twitter. No one knows anyone, not yet, and you have to make connections organically. You have to find people and listen to them and talk to them. I use it the way I used to use Twitter. A funny thing will occur to me and I’ll post it. I’ll see something interesting or beautiful, and I’ll share it. I follow people who interest or amuse me. 

During my first few days on the site, the few political posts that I saw seemed jarringly out of place. Mehdi Hasan was yelling just as loud on Mastodon as he does on Twitter. But most people seem to get the difference between the two sites. This is not to say that people shouldn’t post about politics. People should post about whatever interests them, and the people who tell other people not to post about politics because it harshes their vibe should just calm the heck down. Filter out the terms you don’t want to see and just look at your cat photos. It’s fine. 

What I mean about the difference between the two places has to do with the tone. The tone is different. There’s not as much flamethrowing. There’s not as much trolling for reaction. There’s not as much anger for its own sake. You can’t see how many boosts (the Mastodon equivalent of an RT) a post has received unless you actually click on the post. You can’t see how many favorites (likes) it’s received at all, unless it’s your own post. There is really zero incentive for bandwagon-jumping or piling on. There’s no reward for sycophants or haters. 

There are definitely many things that I will miss about Twitter. Viral inside jokes can be really fun. It’s fun to get the joke, and then come up with another joke that amplifies and improves on the original joke, and then to see everyone’s reactions, and to be part of the party as every funny person on the internet jumps in and tries to one-up everyone else. Twitter is also really good at creating communities of shared interest around topics both really broad and really idiosyncratically narrow. 

But there are many other things that I will absolutely not miss. I won’t miss the bullies and their hangers-on. I won’t miss stupid people who disingenuously misinterpret every tweet or comment to find offense where none exists. I won’t miss the sad people who shamelessly beg for followers. I won’t miss “follow me, blue crew!”

*****

I went to the Capitals game on the night before Thanksgiving. It had been a busy few days and I was tired like tired has never been. I even thought about giving my ticket to one of my kids and just staying home but I really wanted to go to the game. 

Earlier that day, a Mastodon mutual had posted a hilariously silly thread about how much tea he drinks and how much he loves to drink tea and how he was going to stop posting that very minute and go drink more tea. I guess you had to be there. Anyway, I remembered that thread as I drove home from work in very light pre Thanksgiving traffic and thought that a cup of tea and a few minutes in front of my kitchen window watching a late November sunset would be just the thing to put me right. And it was, and 20 minutes later I was on the Red Line on my way to Capital One Arena. I posted a few pictures and comments on the game, and a few Capitals fans found me, and now I have a few more mutuals based on a shared interest. Yesterday, I watched “Elf” with my now-grown children, and I posted running commentary, cracking myself up the whole time. Last night, I connected with a few more new people, and we shared status updates on the massive power outage in Montgomery County (more about that later). 

No billionaires, no crypto, no Draft Kings, and no venture capital. It’s too soon to know for sure, but I think that Mastodon might be the new place to be. Look me up if you happen to be around there. 

Slow ride

Do you know how much IB exams cost? I learned the answer to that question the hard way (which is how I learn most things). The answer is “a shit ton.” Each IB exam costs a shit ton of money, and my son has to take a shit ton of IB exams. Never mind the cost of college. Let’s talk about the cost of getting ready to go to college. I can either support my ridiculous handbag habit, or I can pay for IB exams and university application fees. I can’t do both. 

*****

And do you know what I found in the mail today, right after I finished draining my checking account to pay off the shakedown artists of the International Baccalaureate? A speed camera ticket. A SPEED CAMERA TICKET! I drive like a blind old woman on her way to confession on Saturday, and Montgomery County Maryland expects me to believe that I was caught on camera doing 47 in a 35. On CONNECTICUT AVENUE AT 5:15 on a WEDNESDAY. People walk faster than automobile traffic moves on Connecticut during the afternoon rush hour. Bubba Wallace couldn’t go 47 on Connecticut Avenue between Jones Bridge and Knowles Avenue at 5:15 on a Wednesday. The whole thing is suspect. Suspect, I tell you. 

*****

I wrote this yesterday in a huff of righteous indignation. I was ready to contest that ticket. I was ready to fight City Hall. I was ready to stick it to the man. 

The thing is, I’d have to write emails. I’d have to talk to people on the phone. I might even have to go to court. Do I look like I have time for all that? I haven’t looked at the video yet, but today, I am just as strongly inclined to just pay the stupid $40 and get it over with as I was determined yesterday to fight like Norma Rae on the factory floor. 

$40 is a strategic amount, isn’t it? If it was $50, even though $50 isn’t what it was ten years ago or even one year ago, more people would push back. “Fifty bucks,” they’d think. That’s midway to a hundred. That’s half a Benjamin. But $40? I don’t know, it just seems so much less than $50. If a kid tells you he needs $40 for a school fee, you just hand over the cash. If he needs $50, you say “What? Fifty dollars? Are they crazy?” 

Unless you just paid for a shit ton of IB exams, in which case $50 will seem like chump change. 

*****

“Chump change.” Now I’m a gum-snapping, fast-talking wide-shoulder dame from a 1940s screwball comedy. Which really is not a bad thing to be. I think I was born too late. I belong in a George Cukor-type movie with a script by Donald Ogden Stewart, playing the wisecracking best friend. They could have called me any time Rosalind Russell or Eve Arden were busy. That was a better time, assuming that you’re willing to overlook the racism and the sexism and the manual transmissions. 

OK, so it wasn’t a better time except for one thing: In those days, they had to actually see you speeding if they wanted to give you a ticket. 

******

I started writing this two weeks ago, and in the interim, I received yet another speed camera ticket. This time, I was allegedly driving 47 in a 35 in Darnestown, which is well out of range of my usual stomping grounds. I was driving to a friend’s brother’s funeral. No good deed goes unpunished, you know? 

I still haven’t paid the first ticket, and now I have two, and I’m thinking of contesting both of them. There is no video of either incident. There are photographs that prove that my car was near the cameras, but no moving footage showing how fast I was going, and I have absolutely no way of ascertaining whether or not the camera’s triggering mechanism is properly calibrated. If I contest the tickets and go to court, I could end up paying both the fines and court costs, plus I’d lose part of a work day. I don’t know if it’s worth the time or money. On the other hand, this feels very arbitrary and unfair and I find myself very much unwilling to remit $40 to the County every time they decide to drop a speed limit in order to generate some revenue. 

I think I’ll do some research on court costs and likelihood of a positive outcome, and then I’ll decide what to do. 

*****

Yeah, I paid them. I know.

I’m telling you, I was ready to fight this all the way to the Supreme Court. And when I learned that court costs are usually assessed at less than $25, I was even more enthusiastic about this plan. Then my husband, a police officer, dissuaded me. “They will find you guilty,” he said. “They find everybody guilty - some guy from Safe Speed testifies that the triggering mechanism is properly calibrated and that the camera system is working just fine, and then unless you can prove exigent circumstances or that you were not driving the car, you’ll pay the fine and the court costs and you’ll have wasted half a day, at least.” 

“But...” I said. 

“No ‘but’,” he said. “That’s just how it works. That is how it always works. Do what you want, but when you sit in court all day and still come home $125 poorer, don’t think I won’t say ‘I told you so,’ because I totally will.” 

I’ve been married to this man for 22 years, so I didn’t think for a second that he wouldn’t say “I told you so.” And that is what decided it, really. I could live with the $125. I could even live with losing a day of my life to Maryland Circuit Court. But I couldn’t live with a week or more of “I told you so.”  Everyone has a breaking point. 

*****

The next day, Saturday, I was driving home from my son’s swim meet in Laurel. It was 6 PM, already dark, and my night vision was cooperating. I could see perfectly well, and I got us from the Fairland Aquatic Center on to Maryland 200, known around these parts as the ICC, with no difficulty whatsoever. I moved into the center lane, keeping my speed at around 62 as traffic whizzed past me on both sides. A few people honked as they flew by, obviously annoyed by my determination to obey the 60 MPH speed limit as closely as possible. But I didn’t care. People can climb up my bumper, they can pass me, and they can honk all the livelong day. I was already a cautious driver, and now I’m taking caution to a new level. I’m finished handing over fat stacks of cash to the extortionists at Montgomery County Safe Speed. It’s slow ride time, from now on. 

Julie and Julia

I was very sad to learn of Julie Powell’s untimely death last week. I’m not sure why, really, other than just normal human sorry-to-hear-that impersonal sympathy. I never read her work. In fact, food literature is one category that I generally avoid. Of course I’m sorry to hear of anyone dying an unexpected death at age 49, but I felt this celebrity death a bit more than I expected to. 

Last weekend, during a spare 30 minutes, I started watching “Julie and Julia” on Hulu. I saw the movie when it first came out in 2009 and I remembered really loving the Julia scenes and not really loving the Julie scenes. Quick no-spoiler synopsis in case you haven’t seen the movie: It is based on both Powell’s eponymous memoir and Julia Child’s My Life in Paris, and it alternates between immediate post-9/11 New York City, where Julie Powell lived and worked as a mid-level bureaucrat; and Paris in the 1950s, where Julia Child lived an utterly enchanted life with her diplomat husband, Paul Child. Meryl Streep’s Julia, as I remembered her, was energetic and funny and full of infectious joy. Amy Adams’ Julie, on the other hand, was a whiny, anxious bundle of ridiculous neuroses. 

Well, now it’s perfectly obvious why I hated that character. Because it was like watching all the worst parts of myself, if only I looked like Amy Adams. 

Joking! Lol! Hilarious!

But in all seriousness, I watched part of the movie again, and as Johnny Cash once sang, I come away with a different point of view. I still liked the Julia parts of the movie better. Who wouldn't? Paris, international diplomacy at the height of the Cold War, glamour, mid century style, and what appeared to have been a perfect marriage vs. crowded subways, cubicles, yuppie bitch antagonists in place of friends, overwork, and domestic discord - really, no sane person would prefer Julie's life to Julia's. 

But the women themselves? Well movie Julie wasn't so bad. Yes she was whiny and spoiled and prone to temper tantrums but she was also compulsive and panicky and plagued with anxiety. 

Yes, I know. I keep coming back to this. She really is very much like me. I'd have freaked out over those stupid lobsters. I'd have dreaded boning the duck. Who wants to bone a duck for crying out loud? And I would for sure have pushed myself close to the brink of sanity to meet a fake, self-imposed, and entirely ridiculous deadline.

And besides, movie Julia (and I guess, real-life Julia) lived in Paris in a beautiful free apartment and she only worked because she wanted to. It was easy for movie Julia to be delightful. There would have been no excuse for her to be otherwise. 

*****

I never did read Julie and Julia, but now I think maybe I will. I’ll probably skip Cleaving (as the snotty-faced NYT called it, “Powell's sophomore and only other effort” - burn!) since I have already read one mercilessly honest exceedingly sexually frank overshare of a memoir this year. That one was enough for 2022 and it might have been enough of that genre for pretty much ever. But Julie and Julia is just my kind of thing - a memoir about a specific part of a person’s life and a story about a hard and exhausting though absurdly specific and quirky project. It’s a book about a person doing something that only she could have done. I’m going to finish re-watching the movie at some point, and then I’ll read the book and report back. 

EDT vs EST

I’m preoccupied with time; the limited quantity of time that I have every day and every week and really for the rest of my life. It’s Friday, and I worked in the office today, which I don’t typically do. I arrived home at 5:20 or so, did a few minor chores, and then changed into my sneakers to go walking. I had only about 30 minutes of daylight remaining and that daylight was the achingly lovely early November sunset light that creates a glow around everything including the trees that are already a riot of color. The leaves crunched beneath my feet as I walked as fast as I could, trying to outrun the waning golden daylight. I turned the corner back onto my street just a minute or so before it was well and truly dark, and just as I remembered that this will be my last after-work walk for a while. We fall back on Sunday, an extra hour of sleep in exchange for months of early darkness. 

Yesterday, I heard a news story about Daylight Savings Time on NPR, with a new angle on the debate about keeping the annual clock adjustments or dumping them. Like most people I know, I was delighted when the Senate voted last year to make DST permanent. An extra hour of daylight during the darkest hours of the year would be such a gift, and by late January, we’d have daylight until 6:30 PM or so. 

But I had to be at work by 7:30 on Thursday morning, which means that I had to leave the house by 6:45, which means that I had to drive to work in the dark, which I really really hate. I don’t just hate driving in the dark, I also hate feeling like I’m starting my day in the middle of the night. Although I have to admit, it was really nice seeing the sun rise over Walter Reed as I drove on to the base. 

The NPR story featured a doctor who believes that we should ditch the semi-annual clock back-and-forth, but that Daylight Savings Time is the wrong time standard to hang on to. I was working as I listened so I fogged out a bit during the part where he presented his evidence about circadian rhythms and sleep patterns. But he summed it up in a pretty compelling way, and he just about had me convinced. 

The thing is, though, that by keeping Standard Time, we wouldn’t be making winter any worse than it already is. But we’d be making summer less great. I love those weeks in late June and early July when the daylight hangs on until almost 9 PM. I’d hate to give that up. But I’d also hate months of mornings when the sun doesn’t rise until 8 o’clock. 

There’s no making me happy is there? I know. 

*****

It’s Sunday now, the first Sunday in November, and half of my clocks, the digital ones connected to the internet in one way or another, all read 9:18 AM and my old analog clocks all read 10:18 AM. Someone will turn those clocks back at some point. But we all know what time it is. And that was it - we fell back, we got our extra hour of sleep, and now it’s going to be dark before 6 PM for maybe the next two months. Blah.  

So my conclusion is that as terrible as it is to deal with the one-hour shifts twice a year, we should keep the whole Rube Goldberg spit and glue system in place because it’s the least terrible way to manage the daylight hours and make sure that as many people as possible get as much daylight as possible on both ends of the day. It won’t give me any extra time in a day but I’ll still get 24 hours, same as everyone else.

At home

I have a trash can next to my desk at work. It’s been on the right side of my desk since the day I started; or rather, it used to be on the right side of my desk. The housekeeping staff comes in after hours to empty the trash cans and replace the liners. It’s not a particularly efficient operation, really. Even if there’s one piece of trash in that trash can, they empty it and replace the liner. Or maybe they keep the same liner if it’s clean trash (yes, there is such a thing). But probably not. They probably change the liners no matter what. 

Anyway, I’m only there three days a week but I think they come in nightly and the trash can is or rather was always left exactly in the same spot next to my desk on the right side, until one day last week when the trash can was moved to the left, between my desk and the filing cabinet. 

In typical fashion, I didn’t notice this when I came in, although the space between the filing cabinet and my desk is directly in front of me when I walk into the office. Then, I needed to throw away a paper towel or something, and I was momentarily flummoxed when my trash can wasn’t where it belonged.  After a quick look around, I found it in the aforementioned spot. 

What does a normal person do in this circumstance? Well, let’s keep it real here. I have no damn idea what a normal person would do in this or any other circumstance, but I IMAGINE that a normal person would simply pick up the trash can and move it back to its customary spot. But I didn’t do that. I accepted that the trash can had a new home, much as I would have if it had been made of cast iron and cemented to the floor, and I just adjusted my trash-throwing-away toss (which is pretty accurate). 

*****

My house is in utter disarray right now and if you’ve spent more than five minutes reading this blog, then you know that this is both well out of the norm AND very troubling to me, very troubling indeed. I like order, not chaos. I like things to be neat. But we are replacing a broken-down couch and some very old carpeting in our family room, and the room has to be empty before the carpet and furniture men come tomorrow. 

Even the walls are bare because we painted the room, too, because if you’re going to go to all the trouble of emptying a room of its contents and furnishings, you might as well roll a clean coat of paint onto the walls.

*****

If you want to find out exactly how much stuff a room contains, then empty it of all its contents and place those contents in another room in your house. The family room is a fairly small room, and I didn’t realize that it contained so much stuff. But now that the living room is filled with its own normal stuff AND all of the family room stuff, it seems like quite a lot. I’m writing this in a corner of the living room, where I am hemmed in by two bookcases, a tall and narrow cabinet, two small folding tables that we keep in a corner, and two rolled-up area rugs. It’s kind of nice, actually. It feels cozy. 

The empty room, on the other hand, is rather peaceful. It seems a pity to fill it back up with stuff. Maybe this is my new interior design concept. Makeshift fort constructed of furniture, stacks of books, and rolled-up rugs in one room and sheer empty space in another. I’ll call the furniture people and cancel our order.

*****

The carpet and the furniture were installed on Wednesday, while I was at work. That was the easy part. Then I had to figure out exactly how to organize all of the other family room stuff because the room is configured differently now. The furniture has a different footprint, so all of the other stuff, the cabinet and table and bookcases, needed to be in different locations, and pictures needed to hang in different spots on the wall. I was really a little stressed out about it. But I figured it out. 

*****

It’s been a few weeks now since the unexpected move of my office trash can, and I barely remember the time when that trash can was on the right side of my desk. The right side of my desk is dead to me. There’s a new trash can world order. 

No, I’m not too lazy to move a trash can. I’m just adaptable, a quality that serves a person well when she has to rearrange a room. I figured out where to put all the furniture, new and old, and I found new places for the pictures, and I was pretty happy with the results. It’s not fancy because we ain’t fancy people, I tell you what. But it’s welcoming and nice. Last night, everyone was home for a change, and we all hung out together in the newly spruced-up family room. I watched Game 2 of the World Series, and looked around the room with the new furniture holding the lounging bodies of the three other people I love more than any others. It’s really the nicest room in the entire world. 

Excellent books

I just finished a book that I probably won’t write much about, but just thinking about not writing about that book made me think about all the other books that I have been reading and not writing about, and I think it’s time to get caught up on my slapdash incompetent book reviews. 

*****

Miss Aluminum: A Memoir. Writer Susanna Moore had what would have appeared to anyone to be an enviable life. Think of a girl, so beautiful that she eventually became a part-time actress (this was the 1960s, when only beautiful women could aspire to be actresses) and a part-time spokesmodel (hence the title - she was actually Miss Aluminum for an aluminum trade group) whose father is a doctor in Honolulu in the prosperous middle of the 20th century. The very description suggests an enchanted upbringing; a beautiful, rich, and accomplished couple settles down in a tropical paradise, where they raise their five beautiful children in the freedom and wildness of early statehood Hawaii, with the added privilege of private schools and the social status of doctor’s children. It seems like a fairytale. It seems almost too good to be true. And it was. Moore’s fairytale girlhood was replete with monsters and dragons. Her father was neglectful and callous, her mentally ill mother died when Moore was just 12, and the stepmother who replaced her was monstrously cruel. Moore escaped by moving to Philadelphia, her mother’s hometown, where she lived with a doting Irish grandmother. She married a man who nearly beat her to death, and was later raped by a famous fashion designer who expected more from his models than a walk down the runway. 

Amid all this suffering and abuse, Moore lived a pretty spectacularly interesting life. She acted in movies (badly, if you take her at her word). She worked for a time as Warren Beatty’s assistant (unsurprisingly, he comes across as a bit of a jerk but when you stack him up against the other men in Moore’s life, he’s a veritable prince). She dated Jack Nicholson. She socialized with Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn. It occurs to me that anyone who is younger than 40 (and definitely anyone who is younger than 30) might either not know these names at all or might know them but not know how famous these people really were at that time. Trust me when I tell you that these are big names to drop, and Moore drops them as though they’re just names of people she happened to know. This is not false modesty. This is how she writes about everything, really; she writes about events in her life as though these are things that just happened. It’s almost like she’s an observer and not a participant. Another review of this book described her as “passive,” but I don’t know that this is the right word. The word that I think of is “detached.” There is a distance, a sense of separation between the author and her subject, although they are one and the same. This might be intentional; or it might be an unintentional effect of lingering trauma. But it doesn’t matter. Susanna Moore is a beautiful writer and this book is very much worth reading. 

*****

Invisible Ink, Guy Stern. Guy Stern, who is 100 years old, is an American hero. Born in Germany to a Jewish family, he escaped the Nazis and came to the United States with the help of an uncle in St. Louis, where he attended high school and worked in a hotel kitchen and fell in love with his new country. His family remained in Germany, where they were murdered by the Nazis. Stern joined the Army, was assigned to Camp Ritchie in my own home state of Maryland, and became one of the Ritchie Boys, the famous Army Intelligence unit where native German speakers became spies and POW interrogators. After the war, Stern returned to college, eventually earned a PhD in German language and literature, and became an academic. 

Guy (born Gustav) Stern has lived a rich and interesting life and he comes across as a lovely man, but he is not a writer, at least not in English. Parts of his memoir are really good (especially the war stories), but it’s very inconsistent. In fact, it’s probably not the writing that is at fault, but the editing. The invisible ink of the title is a reference to Stern’s father’s warning that Jews have to blend in if they want to survive. “You have to be like invisible ink,” his father tells him. Invisible ink is a great metaphor for assimilation, but he mentions it just once or twice at the beginning, and doesn’t really do much with the idea afterward. He also tells us practically nothing about his family’s fate, nor about why they were not able to escape to the US or to South America. This is understandable, of course, but I really wanted to know more about Stern’s parents and brother and sister. HIs stories about his time with the Ritchie Boys are probably the best part of the book - both dramatic and hilarious. He even got to meet and hang around with Marlene Dietrich, who was a tireless supporter of the American war effort. But most of the book covers his academic career and unless you are an aficionado of modern German language studies and the internal politics of university language departments in the middle of the 20th century in the United States, then it’s not especially thrilling reading. At times, Stern just recites biographical details and calendar events - he attended this conference or socialized with that person in that city on that day. I’m reminded of P.D. James’ Time to Be in Earnest, but Stern is not as good a writer and except for the war stories, he’s not quite as good as putting the events of his daily life into historical and cultural context. 

*****

The Lion Is In, Delia Ephron. This one was a Kindle recommendation selected because, I suppose, the algorithm believes that one Ephron is as good as the next and that if I liked Nora then I’ll naturally like Delia, too. And you know what? The algorithm was not wrong. If I’d read a synopsis first (three women on the run for various reasons end up stranded in a North Carolina backwater where they take waitressing jobs in a bar where a lion lives in a cage), I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole, but it’s much better than that little summary would suggest. The characters are funny and believable, the story is rather touching, and the writing is quite good. My only real criticism is that two of the characters are supposed to be from Maryland and other than frequent mentions of Baltimore and the fictional small town where the two grew up, there’s really no Maryland local color. But that is a minor complaint. Really, I liked it better than Heartburn. I prefer Nora’s nonfiction to her fiction, any day of the week. Delia is on my list - my good list. 

*****

So Sad Today. Melissa Broder. I don't even know what to say about this book, which is beautiful in spots here and there but is mostly shocking, in that sort of intentional, contrived, look at me, OMG I am so radically transgressively honest that maybe I’m a little too much for you normies way that seems de rigeur among millennial memoir authors. It might seem silly to criticize a memoirist for writing too much or too honestly about herself, but there it is. Because even though this book was frequently shocking, it was also much more frequently boring. Not every thought that a person has is worthy of expression, even if that person has a book contract. 

*****

I had to refer back to my list again to remember what else I’ve read that I haven’t already told you all about. I read a Jennifer Weiner novel this summer. And I had to just look up the title because I couldn’t remember if it was The Summer Place, That Summer, or Big Summer. It was the latter. To be clear, I like Jennifer Weiner. I like her stories, I like her characters, and I like her writing. It’s just that her novels tend to blend into one another, and by throwing “summer” into the title of at least half of them, she does not make it easy to distinguish one from the next. 

Big Summer is a comedy of manners, a morality play, and a murder mystery, all in one pretty entertaining novel. The main character, Daphne, is a Jennifer Weiner archetype - a bit overweight (but still beautiful, if you read between the lines), hard-working and talented and scrappy, making up for in sheer pluck what she lacks in wealth and privilege. The other main character, Drue, is also a Weiner archetype - beautiful, brilliant, and insanely rich and privileged. In some Weiner novels, the rich girl also happens to be a wonderful person (Maxi Ryder, the movie star second heroine of Weiner’s first novel, Good in Bed, for example); but in this case, she happens to be rather awful. And she ends up dead under circumstances that place Daphne, her friends, and her new boyfriend, under suspicion. I didn’t immediately guess who the murderer was; in fact, I was convinced that it was someone else, so the story works on the whodunit level. It also has a lot of not super original but still thoughtful and interesting ideas about modern relationships, wealth and privilege, and social media influencer culture. It’s definitely light reading but sometimes light reading is just the thing. 

*****

British novels of the mid-20th century, especially those set during the war or during the years immediately following, are always obsessed with food. Every few pages or so, a scene will center around breakfast, lunch, tea, or dinner. What to cook, what to eat, how much (always too little), what kind of bread, what kind of meat, what to have for pudding. Kippers, beans, eggs eggs and more eggs, biscuits and sandwich cake and toast with jam or marmalade or butter - all accompanied by tea tea and more tea. Weak tea, strong tea, stewed tea (bad), in mugs (rarely) or thin cups and saucers, with sugar and milk or one or the other or neither. Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Jane Howard and Evelyn Waugh, all writing during or just after the war, were probably always a little hungry. Sometimes their characters are hungry, too; but sometimes, the food just seems to make its way into the novel where it becomes part of the scenery. 

This is what happens in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, which I am just about to finish. The main character is constantly gathering food or planning, cooking, serving, or cleaning up a meal. All of this effort around food seems to serve as a metaphor for her life, a life of routines and tasks; a life of cleaning up one meal and immediately wondering what to do about the next one. Barbara Pym: I understand. I see you, girl. 

I’m not sure how this happened but until I found this book, I had never read Barbara Pym, a British author who wrote very observant novels about the English middle class in the middle of the 20th century. How could I have missed her? Anyway, now that I am almost finished with Excellent Women, I will immediately go and read all of her other novels. I think she wrote five or six. 

Excellent Women is about a woman named Mildred Lathbury, a brilliant name for a character; or rather, a brilliant name for this character who is exactly who you would expect a woman named Mildred Lathbury to be. Mildred is an English spinster in her late 30s in post-war London, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman who died and left a small income (another modern English novel trope - the character who either does not work or works very little, thanks to a “small income” left behind by a deceased relative) to Mildred, who lives in a small flat, goes on holiday every year with an old school friend, works part-time for a charity dedicated to assisting “reduced gentlewomen,” and is constantly taken advantage of by married friends and male acquaintances who assume that Mildred as a single childless woman will naturally have all the time in the world to run their errands, clean up their messes, and serve as their intermediary. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But it’s actually very funny and sometimes very moving. 

According to the introductory notes, Mildred is supposed to be a sad and pathetic character, with an empty and lonely life. But I find her interesting and lively. She is also the first-person narrator, sharply observant and wryly self-aware. She knows perfectly well that her neighbors and acquaintances and even her friends see her as a comically stereotypical spinster, and she cares about their opinions, but not very much. She knows that everyone she knows thinks that they know her, that they can guess what she is thinking and predict her future, and she doesn’t really bother to disabuse them of their perceptions. She just goes about her business and lets people think what they think. This seems to me a very good way to be. Mildred is a bit of a badass in her own restrained daughter-of-an-English-clergyman way. 

*****

Although Excellent Women is, well, excellent, it’s taking me forever to finish. I can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time right now. I get away with this at work because at any given time I have a dozen or more projects, and I just toggle back and forth between and among them. Same thing at home. Sometimes when I’m writing, I walk away in the middle of a sentence, fold a few garments, vacuum a room, cut up an onion or something (I spend a really unreasonable amount of time with a knife in one hand and an onion in the other) and then come back and finish the sentence. 

But I also hate to walk away from a novel that I love. I miss the characters, and I miss the author’s voice. A good novel is good company, and I hate to see it go. I’ll miss Mildred when I finish Excellent Women. 

*****

Well, I do wish that Mildred had politely told the insufferable Everard that no, she didn’t have time to index his dull book and no, she was not interested in proofing his typescripts (for free, of course), but I’m choosing to believe that eventually, she’ll stand up to him and to all of the other men who presume on the goodwill and helpfulness of excellent women like Mildred. 

Yes, I did finally finish the book. I will start another one later today and maybe I’ll report back in haphazard and piecemeal fashion; or maybe the next book I read will be one of the ones that I read on autopilot, forgetting about it completely the moment I close the cover on the last page. Watch this space. Anything could happen. 

Year-round

It's Saturday morning and I am sitting in the stands at the Fairland Aquatic Center, venue for the PVS October Open swim meet. This is a weekend long meet but the 13-18 sessions are first thing in the morning so I am here bright and early, waiting for the Boys 13-18 Breaststroke to begin. The estimated timeline had that event likely to begin at 9:06, an oddly exact prediction. It's 8:42 now so we'll see what happens. 

This is my son's first and last year as a year-round club swimmer. His summer and high school coaches have been trying for years to recruit him to club swimming but he always wanted to play baseball in the fall and spring. Then last spring, he decided that he might want to swim in college. College coaches recruit from club teams so here we are.  

Club swimming is more intense than summer or high school swimming but there's lots of overlap in the personnel. This pool is new to me but I've already run into several people I know. They all said the same thing. "Wait, when did Evan start swimming year round?" And the answer is right now. This is his first club meet. 

*****

It's 9:05 now and we're watching heat 87 or whatever of Boys 13-18 IM so I feel confident in asserting that the breaststroke events will not start on time. So let's talk about the drive over here. Which was oddly enough completely uneventful and stress-free. This is never the case when I'm driving to a new place but even though the pool is new to me, the route here is easy and the roads are familiar. Had it not been for the sun glare, it would really have been a perfect drive. That's where I am right now. I can drive anywhere or any time, as long as it's full daylight but overcast, dry, and nowhere near the Capital Beltway. 

Yeah I know. 

*****

9:22. We're about midway through the Girls’ 13-18 Breaststroke. According to the psych sheet, there are 141 entrants in this event, meaning 15 heats (it's a 10-lane pool), assuming that all 141 of them actually show up. I'm going to assume the opposite and say that we'll probably only see 135 or so, so 14 heats. The fastest kids will swim this race in about a minute. I'm going to guess 30 minutes for the entire event so about 15 minutes to go now that we're watching heat 7. 

There's no program for this thing, only the psych sheet. For the uninitiated, the program lists heats and lane assignments for each event, so that swimmers and spectators know exactly when and where a swimmer will race. The psych sheet lists all of the swimmers in an event, ranked from first to last by seed time. Since it's my son's first meet with this club, he has no official time, so he's way down at the end of the rankings, with all of the other NTs. He will probably swim in an early heat and there will be at least an hour between the breaststroke and freestyle events so I might take a walk while I wait. The chlorine is getting to me, and it's a nice day. 

I was right - there were only 11 heats of the girls’ event, Heat 1 of the boys’ event is now underway. It's hard to tell one swimmer from the next when they're all in black suits and team caps but the scoreboard displays the swimmers names, clubs, and lanes, so I know that my son is not in the water yet. But these races move faster with each successive heat so I need to stop writing and start spectating. 

*****

Can I tell you that my son was in the very next heat after I wrote that paragraph? My timing was impeccable, for once. He crushed it, cruising to a very easy first place in the heat. He won't win the entire event but he's on the radar now. He's no longer a dark horse.

****"

It's 6:15 Sunday morning and way too early for me to be sitting in the shotgun seat on my way to the aquatic center or anywhere else really, but here I am. I volunteered to be a timer this morning. I really love timing at outdoor meets but not so much at indoor meets. It's cold outside but I'm wearing shorts because it will be tropical on the pool deck. 

My son won his heats in both of his events yesterday. He has one more event today, 100 Butterfly. He loves to swim fly but it's not his best stroke. We'll see what happens. I suppose we'll see full results tomorrow or so. 

I'm glad my husband is driving today. It's still nighttime dark outside, and although I feel that I can still drive in the dark, I don't feel as sure of my driving at night as during daylight. And we all know that my daylight driving is a little dodgy to begin with. So I'm happy to sit in the passenger seat and write the blog equivalent of a shit post while someone else conveys me to the pool. 

*****

Timing at a club meet is complicated, I tell you what. They use three timing systems; the automatic system that produces the scoreboard display times, a semi-automated backup system, and the good old-fashioned, stopwatch-around-the-neck method that summer swim parents will be very familiar with. I thought I could escape the timing portion of being a timer by volunteering to take charge of the clipboard, but that only got me out of the stopwatch part. I still had to man the backup system. It was a very busy morning, especially the 50-meter races, which move fast even during the early, slower heats. The fast heats are blistering fast, and you need to check your swimmer’s name, time the race, record the backup time, and be ready for the next swimmer in about 25 seconds. There’s no break between heats; swimmers remain in the pool after they finish so that the swimmers in the next heat can dive right over them. It’s ruthlessly efficient. 

My session lasted for four hours. I haven’t told them yet that I’m also a certified stroke and turn judge (but I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from coaching the judge on my lanes, who missed several egregious backstroke turn violations, and a one-armed overhead pull following a turn by a breaststroker) because timing at 6:30 on a Sunday morning is quite enough. But I didn’t mind. It was time well spent. Still, it’s Monday night now and I don’t think I’m as tired now after a full day in the office than I was after a morning on that pool deck yesterday. That was more work than work. 

Three wheels

I live in an old Levitt-built neighborhood, where the first houses were built and sold some time around 1966 or so. My house, an L-shaped one-level ranch house, was built in 1969. Our neighborhood was “in transition,” as the real estate lady put it, when we bought the house in 2005. “Transition” was, I think, real estate-speak for “becoming less than 100 percent white.” 

Actually, that transition had begun a few years earlier. When this development was first built, I imagine that it was all white or nearly so. Silver Spring was still at that time a desirable, close-in suburb of Washington, DC. It’s still a close-in suburb because Washington, DC didn’t move or anything. But Silver Spring is much more diverse, much more urban, much more densely populated than its counterparts on the western side of the county. We still have lots of green spaces and old growth trees that form shady canopies, but there are also many apartment complexes and townhouse developments here. Hewitt Avenue and Bel Pre Road are divided at intervals by bus stop crosswalks for the many residents who take public transportation between their jobs and their apartments. Spanish is almost as common as English. It’s crowded, sometimes loud, and occasionally chaotic. I love it here. 

Another transition was also underway in 2005; the transition from old to young. I was still young in 2005, at least by today’s definition. I was 39 when we bought this house (I would turn 40 later in the year) and my children were very young. My older son was not quite four when we moved in here, and my younger son was eight months old (making the one-level design of the house ideal for us). Now, we’re not quite old yet, but we’re closer to old than young. Our kids are almost grown. We’re not ready to retire yet but we talk about it. Maybe we’ll move somewhere, depending on where our kids end up. Maybe we’ll stay put (the one-level design is also ideal for retired people). 

In the 17 years that we have been here, many of our older neighbors have moved away, to small condos or retirement communities or assisted living facilities. Some have died. Some are still here. We even still have some original owners living in the houses they bought brand-new and raised their families in. 

*****

This didn’t start as an essay about my classic mid-century suburban neighborhood. It started with me seeing something and wanting to write about it. The thing that I saw–and am still seeing–is an older lady, who is probably really just an old lady, riding a tricycle. 

It’s a large adult-sized tricycle, a thing that I knew existed but had never actually seen in action before. Thankfully, I’m usually swimming laps in the pool when the lady rides her tricycle around the pool parking lot, because she looks a little silly and I always want to laugh when I see her. She doesn’t look as silly as the people riding Segways around the Mall downtown, though. I literally laugh aloud whenever I see someone riding one of those things. That said, they also look like a lot of fun and I’d totally ride one if I had the opportunity. But only with others. If I’m going to do something utterly ridiculous, then I’m taking my family and friends down with me.  

The lady is neither eccentric-looking, nor stereotypically “old-lady” looking, whatever that means. She’s probably in her mid to late 70s, with short, stylish unnaturally bright red hair. I think the extreme color is intentional. I don’t think she’s trying to fool us into believing that her hair never turned gray, like my grandmother, who refused to admit to coloring her hair until the day she died, at age 98–no one was fooled, Nana. I think she just likes punkish, artistic hair color. She wears glasses, probably out of necessity but her frames are also distinctively stylish. I’ve never seen her anywhere other than in the parking lot on her tricycle, so I don’t know what her day-to-day wardrobe looks like, but she wears exercise clothes when she’s riding. 

I assume that the tricycle riding is part of her exercise regimen but she also looks like she has a lot of fun tooling around the parking lot on that crazy giant tricycle. Why a tricycle rather than a bicycle is beyond me. It could be that she never learned to ride a bike. Or it could be that she did once know how to ride a bike but has now forgotten, popular wisdom aside. Maybe she had a stroke or suffered some injury. Or maybe she feels safer and a bit more stable on a three-wheeled cycle. Or maybe the tricycle is just more fun than a bicycle. It looks fun, I have to admit. 

*****

I started writing this a few months ago; maybe mid-July. It’s October. It was hot then and it’s cold now. Well, it’s cold for me, anyway. It’s Saturday morning, 48 degrees, and my summer blood has not thickened yet. I’m not yet accustomed to the cold. Give it until April. 

Anyway, since summer is gone and we’re officially into fall (not just “Labor Day is over” fall, but real, chilly, fire pit at night, leaves crunching underfoot, cable knit sweater fall) and the pool has been closed for weeks, I haven’t seen Tricycle Lady out and about. The pool parking lot remains open but that’s where the neighborhood middle school kids hang out after school. Maybe she rides her tricycle in the morning when I’m at work and all the kids are at school. I don’t know how tough she is but I can tell you that it would take a tough person to ride a giant tricycle through and around a gaggle of seventh graders. That is a tough crowd. Trust me when I tell you that they are not laughing with you. They are laughing at you. 

*****

When I wrote the first few paragraphs of this, I finished with the words "inverse proportion," because I had an idea for a conclusion and I thought that I should write it down so that I would not forget. That is good thinking, right? But it didn't work. When I tried to finish, I couldn't remember what those two words were supposed to mean. But now I think I know. I think I was thinking about the advantages of getting older, chief among them being that the older you get, the less you care about what other people think of you. Desire for approval is in inverse proportion to age, from ages 10 to 90, let's say. So this lady, who is probably in her late 70s or so, is rapidly approaching the age at which she will not care at all. Laugh your heads off, middle schoolers. Tricycle Lady doesn’t care. Much like the Honey Badger of circa 2012 internet fame, Tricycle Lady doesn’t give a shit. She’s going to keep on riding. 

The critical path is narrow and few will find it

I took a project management class last week. It was not terrible, and given my noted aversion to the entire discipline of project management AND my hatred of online training, this is high praise. But of course, also given the said aversion and hatred, it would be reasonable to ask me why I took this class in the first place? Well it had to do with training dollars that needed to be spent and the rapidly approaching end of the fiscal year and before I knew what happened I was signed up to learn all about project management. Sometimes you just happen to be walking through the station, and you end up on the train.

Project management trainers (this was a live synchronous class, offered via Zoom) love to tell everyone who will listen that project management has broad applications beyond the realms of software development or construction, and I’m sure they’re quite right. I would simply suggest that if they want to really make that case, then write training class scenarios that draw on examples from any other industry. But she was a very good trainer and what the class lacked in direct relevance to my job, it made up for in energy. 

Lack of relevance aside, I did learn some ideas that are generally useful and relevant, though we spent far too much time on the critical path, a thing that I will never track, measure, or even think about, ever again, God willing. I couldn't pick a critical path out of a lineup. I wouldn't recognize a critical path if it lived next door. The critical path and I move in different circles. Nothing personal, it's just that the critical path and its friends have nothing to do with my life. 

*****

Maybe I need to project manage this blog because these half-finished drafts continue to proliferate, and yet I just keep writing new stuff. 

*****

Do you know what else has nothing to do with my life? Data. Data and metrics. Just as not everything is a project that can or should be managed, not every endeavor lends itself to measurement. Almost anything can be evaluated, but not everything can be quantified. At least that's how I see it, but most of American management theory has not yet caught up with my visionary thinking on the subject, which is why I spend so much time thinking about metrics when I would really rather not. 

Give me any data visualization other than the simplest pie chart, and it will make no more sense to me than an ancient Greek scroll or whatever those ancient Greeks wrote stuff down on. I can barely read a map, so don’t get me started on histograms. Ask me about almost any number, whether it’s a completion percentage estimate, or a reasonable length of time to finish a project, or (and this is a big one) how much something is going to cost, and I’ll look for all the world as though I’m crunching the numbers and analyzing the data. And then I’ll take a guess. And it’ll be a wild guess, pulled out of absolutely nowhere. 

I’m just keeping it real. I’m terrible at quantitative reasoning, but I excel at keeping it real. 

*****

I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately (define "lately" as "every day of my life.") I come home and feel like I have a million things to do; a million tasks. Most of these are self-assigned tasks, but if you prick them, do they not bleed? Well, you know what I mean. I mean just because it’s a self-assigned task doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be done. I’m a demanding supervisor of myself, but I’m fair. 

So every time I feel overwhelmed (which is all the time, but I mean every time I feel really overwhelmed, like beyond reason), I think that I should give something up and the only thing that I can think of to give up is my writing habit. Daily writing is a self-assigned task like all the others; a self-imposed burden. But it’s my favorite self-assigned task and so why do I have to  give it up? Why not give up laundry-folding or bill-paying or meal-planning? 

*****

I was driving to work one day last week singing along with Bruce Springsteen’s “Trapped” on the radio. “Trapped” is about a bad relationship but it’s also about living in a prison of one’s own making and it made me feel both validated and accused; validated because I know how those prison walls feel and accused because I feel that it’s my fault that I’m behind those walls. It is my fault, really. I worry about things that are beyond my or anyone else’s control. I force myself to complete tasks that maybe don’t need to be completed right away or maybe ever. My to-do list is the absolute boss of me, and interruptions to my routine throw me into a tailspin of dithering indecision and panic. I’d like to be free. I’d like to break out of this trap, but I don’t know how. I’ve been inside too long. I’m institutionalized. 

*****

Oh my gosh. I DID need that project management training. For God’s sake. I need to project manage my life. 

An apple and a tree

My niece was visiting one day last week. She is six, and I am her favorite non-parent adult relative. This is not a boast, just a statement of fact that her uncles, her grandparents, and her cousins would all confirm. If six-year-olds had the vote, I would be an unstoppable political force in the United States.

Anyway, she and I were writing stories, which is what we do. She comes up with story ideas, I write the words, and we assemble and distribute our books to the reading public. We were in the middle of a page when my niece whispered to me that she had to go to the bathroom. 

"Go ahead, " I said. "I'll wait." I mean, we were working, but even highly prolific children's book authors on deadline need occasional breaks.  

A moment later, I noticed that she was still standing behind me, waiting for me to notice her. "Everything OK?" I asked. She hasn't wanted help in the bathroom for a long time, but she obviously needed something. 

She looked to her left and right, and then she leaned in. "I'm afraid to flush," she whispered. 

I kept a straight face. This, by the way, is why little kids love me. I take them seriously. 

“You’re afraid to flush?” I asked her. “Why?”

Eyes left and right again, like Mike Ehrmentraut at a dead drop collecting a brown bag full of cash: “What if it comes UP, instead of going DOWN?” “Up” and “down” were accompanied by hand gestures. 

I thought for a moment. “That is a valid concern,” I said. “Tell you what: you go and do what you need to do, and then tell me when you’re ready to flush. We’ll do that part together.” 

She nodded, skipped off to the bathroom (that is how six-year-old girls get around; they skip) and called me when it was time to flush. 

“OK,” I said. “Here’s what you’re going to do. Stand here.” I pointed to a spot just barely within arm’s reach of the toilet. “Reach over and flush, and then hop back really quick. I promise you that it’s going down and not up, but just in case it DOES come up, you’ll be ready, and it won’t get you.” She nodded, obviously satisfied with this solution. She leaned over, flushed, and hopped backward. As expected, the contents of the toilet went down and not up. We washed our hands, resumed writing, and produced our best work yet, a story about a little girl who really doesn’t want a haircut but then finally yields to parental pressure and submits to the scissors, and is really happy with the result. A bit of a roman a clef, if we’re being honest here. We can’t make EVERYTHING up.  

*****

My niece is actually not related to me by blood. She is my husband’s sister’s child. So in the debate about nature vs. nurture, the latter would have to prevail in any analysis of this child’s very strong resemblance to me, psychologically speaking. She is introverted but not afraid of people (though she used to be quite afraid of anyone she didn’t know well). She is a reader and writer. She’s very funny, though often unintentionally so. She loves swimming, shopping, and chocolate. And she has more quirky fears and anxieties than the psychiatric profession can shake a stick at. “What if it comes UP instead of going DOWN?” That is next level, as they say on the Twitter. 

*****

I mean, what if it DOES come up instead of going down? Then what? 

*****

I meant to ask my sister-in-law if they had had some horrifying plumbing disaster or if my niece had possibly seen or heard something that would make her think that a toilet might expel rather than swallow its contents, but I forgot. But maybe she conceived of the idea on her own. She is very imaginative, and very prone toward anxiety, much like her aunt. I imagine horrifying situations all the time, and then I worry about them until they might just as well be happening. 

What was that? You’re so glad you’re not me? Yeah, you have no idea. NO. IDEA. Sigh. 

*****

But even with my noted propensity to worst-case-scenario my way through every day of my life, I have never worried about a toilet flushing in reverse. Knowing me, though, this just begs the question: Why not? How could I have overlooked this possibility? How could I NOT have worried about this? After all, this is an old house and our kitchen sink has been known to back up, forcing my husband to snake the pipes with a very expensive machine that he bought for the purpose (money well spent, BTW - I can think of three separate times in the last ten years when without that machine, we’d have been at the mercy of the plumbing-industrial complex). What’s to stop the toilets from backing up or worse? Nothing, that’s what. Here I am spending 25 hours a day every day worrying about things that range from utterly impossible to very unlikely, and I failed to even consider the very real possibility of an ejection toilet. 

*****

And really, given the documented instances of snakes and alligators in toilets, upward flushing doesn’t even seem like the worst thing that could happen vis-a-vis toilets. So much to worry about. SO MUCH TO WORRY ABOUT. 

*****

My niece goes to school every day, and she goes to dance class and Girl Scouts and swim practice, and I know that she is frequently anxious and sometimes even scared. Sometimes she needs a pep talk. Sometimes she needs a friend to come along for the ride. But she overcomes the fear and she does what she needs to do. I wish I could tell her that when she grows up, she won’t get scared anymore, but it doesn’t always work that way. I don’t even know if overcoming the fear makes you ultimately stronger. I do it all the time and I don’t know that I’m all that strong, but maybe I’m stronger than I would be if I gave in and stayed home in bed every time I worried about impending doom or disaster, which would mean that I’d never get out of bed. 

I wish I wasn’t like this, and I won’t even pretend that I don’t. I’d much rather be a bold, fearless, adventurous person. But I’m not. I’m not a badass. I was born to be mild. It’s too soon to say what my niece will be like when she’s older. She’s only six, after all. But I see a lot of myself in her, and when she gets older, she might also wish that she was different. 

But we do what we have to do. We speak at the meeting, or or we drive to fucking Tyson’s Corner in rush hour Beltway traffic, or we flush that toilet. We show that toilet who’s boss, I tell you what. So I’m giving us credit; not for bravery, but for getting over it and pretending we’re OK even when we’re not and for showing up every gosh darn day. There’s a lot to be said for showing up. 

Proscrastination

A few days ago, I wore a dress that I hadn't worn in a long time. Any time I wear something old, I end up receiving a compliment, and that is exactly what happened. And just like 90% of nice middle-aged ladies, l can't just accept a compliment with a simple "thank you." I have to explain myself. I explained to the nice young Navy officer that I hadn't worn the dress for months because it had been missing two buttons, and I hate sewing buttons more than almost any other chore. And then I finally sewed the stupid buttons back on and wore the dress and received a compliment from the very first person I ran into. She laughed politely and went on her way. I thought, not for the first time, that it would be nice to have a uniform. But it's too late for me to join the Navy.  

*****

About a week or so ago, I received a letter from the Office of the Victim Advocate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I couldn't make myself open it, and so it sat in my desk drawer for the next ten days, give or take.

Finally, I opened and read the letter, which was, just as I expected, a notice that the man who raped me many years ago was approaching his parole eligibility date and that it I had any comments or concerns, I should content the Victim Advocate immediately. The word "immediately" was in bold type, because of course it was. And I didn't know what to do, so I put the letter back in the drawer and ignored it, thinking that I would just wait for it and the entire situation to go away. It’s just like that dress. Maybe I thought that the dress would repair itself, that the buttons would just magically reappear in their proper places. This approach always works very well for me, very well indeed. 

*****

The man has been in prison for a long time. If I could make myself call or write to the Victim Advocate, I think I would tell them that they should recommend him for parole. But I can't seem to make myself pick up the phone or even write an email. I can’t make myself even think about this. Yes, I’m writing about it, but I’m not thinking about it. I’m thinking about how not to think about it. I’m writing about not thinking about it. 

*****

The thing is, it's complicated. Everything is complicated. It’s been a long time, and I go for days, sometimes WEEKS at a time without thinking about the rape, and now it’s back, trying to get into my head again, and I don’t want it there. 

On the other hand, I know that the Office of the Victim Advocate means well. They’re doing their job. And on the face of it, the idea that a victim should have some say in decisions regarding the person who violated her is, I suppose, a good one. It’s empowering, right? Who doesn't want to feel empowered? 

Well, me, maybe. Maybe this is that one instance in which I do not want too much empowerment, because empowerment comes with responsibility, and I'd rather not be responsible for what happens to this man. I mean, the dude broke into my house at 3 in the morning and attacked me, and then I had to go to the hospital and suffer through the indignity of the rape examination, and then I had to tell the story over and over again to the police and the state’s attorney, and I had to go to fucking therapy and spend weeks and months and years healing and recovering and trying to get the memories out of my mind and body. Have I not been through enough? Have I not already contributed enough to this crime? I did the victim part, right? Should I also have to pass judgment? Should I also have to assess the penalty? Isn't the criminal justice system supposed to make these decisions? 

I mean, do I have to do EVERYTHING around here? 

JESUS. 

*****

Oh, and did I mention that he also stole my bike on his way out? How is that for adding insult to injury? I mean, really. REALLY. 

The bike theft was actually a good thing because that is how they caught him. My bike was pink. It was pink and it had a red basket attached to the handlebars. He wasn’t hard to spot, riding that ridiculous thing around the Main Line at 5 in the morning. They arrested him, arraigned him, assigned a public defender, and he confessed to the whole thing. I attended his sentencing hearing, but there wasn’t a trial. Later, the police offered to return the bike to me. I declined that offer. 

*****

I finally responded to the letter. My options included appearing in person (yeah right), videotaping a statement (lol), calling them on the phone, or sending a letter or email. So at least one decision was easy. 

This man has been in prison for a long time and trust me when I tell you that he belonged there, at least at first. But I don’t know what he is like now. I don’t know what he was like in prison. I don’t know if he’s sorry for what he did. He apologized to me at the end of the sentencing hearing, but I don’t know if he meant it. But I guess that he has probably suffered quite a bit. I don’t wish him any further suffering, and I asked the Victim Advocate to recommend him for parole assuming that he hasn’t been violent in prison and with the condition that he never try to contact me in any way. I don’t wish him any ill. But I don’t want to see him or hear from him or really even think about him ever again. 

It’s 12:30 in the afternoon on a beautiful sunny Saturday, and I feel like I need to go back to bed. That was exhausting. Any other clothing in need of repair is going to wait at least six months. I don't have the energy to go through that again. 

On the road again

It's Saturday morning and I am sitting in a huge conference room at the Westin Hotel, Tysons Corner, Virginia. A Tysons hotel conference room with a giant screen displaying the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation screams 8 AM on Wednesday not 10:30 AM Saturday (IYKYK), but I'm not here for work. It's Machine Aquatics Parent - Swimmer Day, and I am a Machine Aquatics parent. My swimmer is sitting next to me, examining his Machine Aquatics gear, which includes two t-shirts, a cap, a car magnet, and a bag tag, all packed into an orange nylon and mesh Speedo bag. It’s a pile of swag, and he’s pretty pleased with it. I’m thinking that two grand is a lot of money to pay for a drawstring bag and some t-shirts, but it’s early for a Saturday and I’m a little salty. 

Why am I salty? I mean, it’s not that early. And the money is not a big deal either, lucky for me. I’m salty because I had to drive to Tysons Corner, which means driving the Capital Beltway, and I really hate driving the Capital Beltway. 

*****

Last week, I had lunch with some coworkers, one of whom regaled us with stories of her side job as an Uber driver. People, I tell you. The stories. One by one, our other coworkers chimed in with reasons why they could never be Uber drivers. One person could never be an Uber driver because she's very particular about her car and would not want to allow strangers to sit on her upholstery. “I don’t know where these people have been,” she said, shuddering. Another person couldn’t drive for Uber because she’s heard horror stories about people getting robbed and beaten by their Uber passengers, and she would fear for her personal safety. Another said that she couldn’t drive for Uber because she gets lost even with voice-narration GPS. 

That last one is true for me, too. But that’s not the real reason why I can’t drive for Uber. Well, the real reason is that I just really don’t want to be an Uber driver. Should circumstances ever demand that I take a second job, I’ll do it without complaining, but I won’t be driving for Uber. Maybe I’d be a barista. That might be fun. Or I’d work at the front desk of the aquatic center because I’d like seeing all the kids coming in for swim practice. Happy memories. But let’s say that I wanted to drive for Uber or that I was at least not unalterably opposed to the possibility of doing so. I still couldn’t because I am just not a very good driver anymore. 

This is why I hate driving the Beltway. It’s because every time I get on 495, I am once again reminded that I was once a good driver, and now I am not. This is one of any number of things that are true even though I wish they weren't.  

*****

The Beltway was fine on Saturday. We got to the Westin on time and without incident, and I found outdoor parking, which is always my goal. I never used to mind driving the Beltway but I have always hated subterranean parking garages and now I hate them even more, because dark, cramped parking garages are no place for terrible drivers. Anyway, we arrived safely, and we returned home in much heavier traffic, and I kept a grip, literally and figuratively. My hands were white-knuckle clinging to the steering wheel at 10 and 2 like barnacles attached to the hull of the gosh darn Andrea Doria, but my demeanor was calm. If you didn’t notice how tightly my hands were clamped to that steering wheel (they still hurt), then you would have mistaken me for a reasonable person who didn't have a care in the world. People mistake me for a reasonable person ALL THE TIME. 

*****

All’s well that ends well. I got us from Point A to Point B and back again, all in one piece, and no one knew that I was terrified the whole time and it seems to me that both of those things represent victory. For now.

*****

 

Transitional

School year 2022 - 2023, my youngest child’s senior year, is underway; and although I’m not thrilled that summer is over, back to school and back to a more predictable routine is not such a bad thing. I won’t get to swim in the evenings anymore, but I also won’t be cooking dinner at 8:30 PM only to find that no one is planning to eat at home anyway. 

Last Thursday, I attended my very last MCPS Back to School Night. I almost skipped it altogether. Weather conditions were ideal for after-work swimming on one of the last pool nights of the year, and my son has only one teacher whom I had not met already. He is in the second year of his IB program and has most of the same teachers he had last year. The one exception is a teacher my older son had as a senior. So I wouldn’t have missed anything important. But I went because I’ve never missed a BTS night and it was likely the last time that I’d ever visit a classroom at Rockville High School. I’ll be back for band concerts, but I’ll probably never walk through the school again beyond the auditorium. 

As much as I hate back to school, I really like Back to School Night. The place was crackling with energy. Several of my son’s friends, who were volunteering as Ambassadors, greeted me as I passed them in the hallways. Band parents and baseball and swim parents waved and shouted hellos. The classrooms were spotlessly clean and colorful, decorated with posters and student art and homey little odds and ends. All of the classrooms were cheerful and welcoming and one or two were downright charming. I paid my Booster Club and PTSA dues. I avoided buying any more gosh-darn t-shirts and water bottles and car magnets. I slipped out before the last class period (this is my eighth year as a Rockville band parent, so I know the drill for music students) and escaped the parking lot before the mass exodus. It was rather a nice way to spend an evening. I’m a little sad that it’s the last one. It’s the last year, and I’m not ready. 

*****

According to the calendar, we still have about two weeks of summer remaining. But the calendar is wrong. Yesterday was Labor Day and the pool is closed for the season. When children are back in school and the pool is closed, summer is over, no matter the temperature. 

As much as I hate Labor Day and everything it stands for, it was kind of a perfect LDW, and Labor Day itself was delightful. The weather forecast was not promising, so I swam early in the day lest the threatened thunderstorms forced the pool to close early. At 3 or so, the sky darkened and the breeze picked up and I finished swimming and went home, thinking that this was it for the summer. And it was fine, really. 

The previous day, my neighbors and I had agreed that we’d meet at the pool pavilion on Monday at 5 for a slapdash, half-baked, no-rules potluck. No sign-ups, we agreed - we’ll just see what shows up, and that is what we’ll eat. We further agreed that the potluck would happen rain or shine and that if it was raining too hard to sit in the pavilion, then we’d move it to someone’s house. 

I came home and made some chicken, and although the sky was ominously heavy and gray, there was no rain. I wrapped up the chicken, grabbed some napkins and plasticware and a bucket of ice, and we all gathered under the pavilion for the last time this summer and ate what turned out to be a very good dinner. People showed up, as they say on the Twitter. People understood the assignment. We had more than enough food for everyone and we were able to feed the lifeguards and all the other random kids who were getting their last few minutes of summer at 6 PM even as cloudy skies and cool breezy temperatures reminded us that October is around the corner and winter is right behind it. 

We finished dinner and walked down to the pool deck to stand and watch the kids playing their last round of pool games until next May. And the pool looked cold and dank and gray. But then we adults decided that we also needed one last swim. Some of us had already brought suits and towels. Others ran home to change. And one by one, we slipped into the dark gray chilly water, for one final swim. The pool was a wide-open watery space, the lane ropes and  barrier ropes gone. 

For the last two weeks, the pool has been amateur hour, crowded with casual visitors who never bother with the pool until zero hour, when they suddenly realize that summer is almost over. But on Monday, the dilettantes and daytrippers were gone, and only the hardcore, dedicated pool rats remained and the rules no longer applied. Kids were jumping off the lifeguard chair into the deep end. Kids played football and basketball and water polo, all at once. And the handful of adults swam through and around them. It was a damn free-for-all. It was glorious.

But it was cold, and as it grew dark, the adults, myself included, were too chilled to continue. And so we exited the water, one by one, the way we came in, and we stood on the deck, wrapped in towels and hoodies, watching the kids wring every drop of fun out of summer's last few moments. And then, the whistle blew for the last time, and it was time to go. The sky, by then, was inky dark blue. The air was chilly and we could feel autumn. We could smell it.

*****

It's Friday now, and summer already seems ages ago. It's time for fall things, fire pits and brisk walks and jackets and Halloween candy and avoiding PSL. It's transition time.