Blocks

I am never sure where the boundary is between living out loud and authentically and stupid oversharing.  I might be crossing the line.

I went to bed late last night because I was trying to solve my problems without actually doing much constructive.  That is to say, I finished watching the third season of Grantchester while quilting and drinking a small amount of whiskey.  I made the mistake of checking my email and social media before crawling under the covers.

My ex commented on one of my Instagram posts.

He said something totally innocuous.

It took me until this morning to figure out what to do.

I blocked him.

This may sound extreme.  But it isn’t.

My kid said something incredibly useful to me once.  He said that it is totally possible to believe in redemption, but that redemption doesn’t mean that we have to be the agents for any particular person’s redemption.  I’m sure he said it more elegantly than that.  His point was that we can want someone who is hurt and has hurt us to get better, but that we might not be the best ones to help with that process.  We might not be able to help at all, in fact.  We do not need to hurt ourselves more in trying.  Other people with more distance can be more useful.

It is entirely possible that my ex has figured things out.  He may be happy and healthy and sober.  He may have made contact in a spirit of reconciliation or friendliness or some other good thing.

I can’t risk it.

Sometimes an innocuous first step leads to despair.  I am not strong enough to go there again.

I would like to imagine it possible that there would be the kind of peace between us that could allow conversation, but I don’t believe in it.  I don’t like the person I become when I am in relation to him.  For me to be healthy, it has to be a total break.  The kids seem to feel the same way about the break, if less generally optimistic even about the possibility of peace.

There are many, many layers of irony here.

My ex has pointed out, as recently as the last time I foolishly engaged in an email conversation, that I was the one who said he should try to mend relations with his father many years ago.  That yes, his father was an alcoholic and difficult, but that he was the only father he had.  That the hate he was carrying was not good for him.  He listened to me.  They built a workable, if not fabulous, relationship.  He thinks I have not given the same advice to the kids.  He is partly wrong.

I have told the kids that forgiveness is good for them.  I want them to be free of the bad times.  But I fiercely defend their decisions not to allow themselves to be hurt again.  They have learned to set appropriate boundaries and to shun people who do not respect those boundaries.

Another irony is that I can drink a little whiskey, but I can’t have a little contact with an alcoholic.  Maybe we all have drugs we can’t handle and dysfunctional relationship is mine.  It is so easy for me to agree that I am the problem.  After all, it is almost always at least partially true.  The elegant solution turns out to be removing me, but not in the way I used to think.  When the dysfunction met up with my depression, I was sure that the solution was suicide, but it’s really just not playing.

I made the right decision.

Now if I can just figure out how to block my brain feed…

Yep, still reading...

In keeping with my new-ish plan to write about what I’m reading closer to when I read it, I need to catch up a bit.  I’ve got ten books to write about since last time.

Much of my reading outside of my nutrition text book has been about flat-out escapism.  In that vein, I was thoroughly excited when I remembered that I had the first volume of the Munchkin graphic novel on my shelf.  It was just like the game:  fun and low-stakes with doses of goofy humor and a surprising amount of attachment to fairly minimal characters.  I will seek out volume two at some later date (maybe after kicking in the door of my local game shop to loot the room for it?) (That was a Munchkin game joke…).

My bookshelf-clearing friend bequeathed me several Bobbsey Twins books, written by Laura Lee Hope (who may, for all I know, be like Carolyn Keene, a pen name for anonymous write-to-order authors).  I read The Bobbsey Twins in the Country and The Bobbsey Twins at Spruce Lake.  I remember having read some of the many zillion in the series when I was a kid.  I did not remember the casual racism and classism and sexism.  Rereading left me feeling somewhat split—my uncritical, soaking-in-it small self enjoying the adventures and my current, appalled self wanting to apologize to pretty much everyone in the world for the arrogance, bias, and general entitlement of white people.  Somewhere in the middle of those two selves lurked the ghost of an earlier version of adult me who used to believe that we put the best of our society in our books for children, the golden, good parts that laid out our ideals; she looked unhappy.  So that route to escapism didn’t turn out entirely well.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales (both in one volume, so counting as one book) held up somewhat better, possibly because he makes fun of everyone, from the young adult narrator to the sassy children to the erudite elders as he retells various Greek myths.  Myths, being durable, seem to survive the interpretations layered on them through succeeding generations.  After all, almost everyone enjoys a good monster battle, even if we tend to redefine the monsters in every generation.

Speaking of monsters, Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George create a scary one in Interface.  It’s a tale of AI gone wrong, unleashed on politics via cyber upgrades to a candidate’s brain, making him remotely controllable, eminently electable, and very, very dangerous.  I liked it, but found it depressing because the manipulation of the electorate seemed all too real and the relatively happy ending all too imaginary.

Then I turned to Jonathan Stroud, who also has much to say about monsters (well, ghosts) and the monsters that unleash them on the rest of us.  I read the fourth and fifth books in the Lockwood and Company series, The Creeping Shadow and The Empty Grave.  The series as a whole has an interesting premise, in that only children and teens can see and deal with the ghosts that are haunting and hunting the living in dystopian modern London and environs.  It’s a good way to deal with the get-rid-of-the-adults-so-the-adventure-can-happen problem in these days of helicopter parenting.  It’s also a gesture of faith in the next generations:  they have the resilience and tools to fix the messes we older people have made for them.  As always, the prose is well-constructed and amusing.  The characters have depth, by which I mean that they remain likeable even when they have flaws if we are rooting for them and they have motivations that aren’t just evil for the sake of evil if we are rooting against them.  The fifth book could be the last, although it leaves a little room for another go.  Our heroes are going to age out soon, so I don’t see more than one more coming in any case.

Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) turns in some respectable work in Lethal White, the new Cormoran Strike mystery.  Good prose and the twists and turns of romance made up for the fact that I figured out who did it (and I almost never manage that).  I have liked all the books in the series, but have not felt the need to keep or reread them.

Julia Buckley’s book A Dark and Twisting Path at last provided the escapism I was looking for all along.  Buckley writes cozies.  Bad things happen, of course, but our attractive heroine bravely faces whatever happens with her dear friends and handsome boyfriend to help.  Also, there is delicious food.  She could write faster and I would be okay with that because in these times, solvable problems are extremely satisfying.

Finally, I read something practical for facing these times:  Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith.  My kid told me to read it.  Tuhiwai Smith writes about the indigenous experience of research, how it and researchers have often perpetrated further crimes against the indigenous populations in the name of “extending knowledge.”  The first half of the book describes the problem, which is familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to any of the oppressed people’s complaints about white Western society in the last long time.  The second half describes actual useful ways of thinking and doing to get past the evil and move toward something much better.  Elegant and accessible writing make the book much more pleasant to read than I expected and I was encouraged that there was hope to be found in her practical, thorough, and inclusive plans.  Turns out I needed that more than escapism.  Go figure.

I am now up to date.  Fall total so far:  16 books.