Last 2020 Reading!

Six books to round out the year.  One of them, Joan Ryan’s Intangibles is the subject of tomorrow’s post on my work blog.  Short version:  read it.

 

In preparation for 2021, I read Artist’s Journal Workshop by Cathy Johnson.  I love words, but I need another way to access my creativity.  Incorporating pictures seems like the way.  I am more than a little intimidated by the lovely sample pages in the book, but the goal is learning, not making beautiful stuff, so it will be fine.  I’m playing.

 

I’m a Don DeLillo fan, so it is no surprise that I enjoyed The Silence.  His way with language is like no one else’s and yet seems to grasp the essence of things.  If I grow up, I might want to be him.  The premise of the book, that all our tech stops working and we have to figure out who we are without it, is fascinating and a bit scary.

 

The last three were more Tamora Pierce.  I read the first three Circle of Magic books, the ones for Sandry, Tris, and Daja (and of course I will also read Briar’s, but next year!).  I like these younger characters and the team nature of the stories.  Connection is good.

 

Fall total:  37 books

2020 total:  106 books

More fall reading!

Pandemic reading continues, but I did spur myself on to read two nonfiction books, as well as another five books of fiction.

 

Beijing:  From Imperial Capital to Olympic City by L. Li, A. Dray-Novey, and H. Kong was far more interesting than I expected it to be.  I admit that some of that is because I am fascinated by the Mongols and they had an important role in the city’s history.  Since I began with approximately zero knowledge of Chinese history, I learned a ton.  There was intrigue, adventure, and terror (Red Guard teens terrorizing anyone they didn’t like!).  I had not really considered, on a city scale, what preservation and restoration mean.  The primarily wooden architecture of the oldest parts of Beijing has not lasted like stone building would.  If it is restored, is it authentic?  If a structure that was famous as a “ruin” is to be restored, to what level does the restoration go?  (I encountered some variations on these ideas in Sweden at the Vasa museum, where the parts of the ship that were replaced were left a different color than the original bits brought up from the water, and in Sydney where much of the Barracks museum is devoted to the question of what a museum is, complete with wall areas that reveal layer upon layer of paint from different iterations of the building, but a whole city is so much larger…)  I can’t say that the book scratched the itch of wanting to travel—now I want to travel even more.

 

The Alice obsession led me to read Colin Gordon’s Beyond the Looking Glass:  Reflections of Alice and Her Family.  It’s an impressionistic book, based on the author’s access to a trove of Liddell family papers and other items.  I would not say that it shines any new light on the relation of Alice Liddell to Alice in Wonderland, but it does give an interesting amount of context to the world both person and book came from.  I liked the copious illustrations including sketches and painting and photos by and of Alice and her family, the well-chosen excerpts from a voluminous correspondence, and the overall picture of a changing world.  Definitely worth reading for the enthusiast, but probably not for anyone less obsessed than I am.

 

My progress through the collected works of Tamora Pierce led me to read Tempests and Slaughter, the first book in the Numair Chronicles.  It is good to know that her work is as compelling when the protagonist is a scrappy young man as it is when she writes about determined young women.  I like the backstory on where Numair came from and his complex relationships.  I still am not quite over the difficulty I have with what happens later in his story with the older man/young girl relationship thing, but that was a whole different book, so it may not be fair to let it color my experience of this one.

 

I’m also reading along in my Ursula Le Guin books.  This time, I read Buffalo Gals, which is a collection of short stories and poems.  I remain enchanted with her use of language and her ability to find unique perspectives on old problems.  I am glad I still have quite the stack of her work to read.

 

If it were not already clear, I’ve been working several obsessions at once here.  I read two short works from J.R.R. Tolkien, Famer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wooton Major.  Both were charming, often funny, smart, and satisfying.  I love his epic vein, but his mock-epic and humorous takes are often as nourishing to my soul.

 

Finally, something not attached to a current obsession.  I very much enjoyed Philippa Pearce’s book Tom’s Midnight Garden.  In these lonely times, finding a book about one loneliness finding comfort in another is a gift.  It is a lovely story.

 

Fall Reading to date:  31 books

2020 Reading to date:  100!

Nope

 (This is a photo of my grandfather with my father and my aunt.)

I have a confession to make, sort of.  I am not going to call my aunt.  This is a factual statement and not a confession, because I’m not sorry that I’m not going to call her and I don’t intend to repent of my decision.

 

To some extent, I feel guilty about this.  My aunt is in her eighties, lives alone in Section 8 housing, has no family nearby, and can’t see the few friends she has due to the pandemic.  Until recently, I was the only family member who ever had any contact with her.  It would be kind to give her another human to speak to.

 

Except.

 

It would not be kind to me.

 

When I was a little girl, we didn’t see her that much because she lived in Illinois and we were in California.  When we did see her, I thought she was glamorous and fun.  She wore hoop earrings, talked about astrology, and brought me a psychedelic-colored stuffed alligator toy.  Once when we visited her and my grandmother, she let me play with her jewelry box, crammed with brightly colored costume necklaces.  Later on, my very conservative mother was not sure that it was appropriate to take my brother and me to the apartment where she was “living in sin” with her boyfriend.  We ended up going and it was kind of a let down; her boyfriend gave us Mountain Dew and teased that it was alligator piss, but that was the most exciting thing about the whole day.

 

Looking back, she definitely did things her own way.  She was pretty and spoiled, raised to be married.  She never held a job.  She delights in typing cryptic missives on her manual typewriter.  She loved flirting and even now will focus her considerable charm on any man in the room.  She makes her way in the world through, essentially, manipulation.

 

When she first moved into the place she’s living now, I felt sorry for her.  I went to visit.  I dragged the rest of the family along sometimes.  I’d buy her some groceries, take her to lunch.  She didn’t drive, so I’d help her with errands from time to time—not that often because she lived more than an hour away.  I enjoyed her stories.

 

The thing is, she was always working an angle.  She complained about how hot it was in her place, so Brent and I got her a portable air conditioner.  She turned around and returned it for cash.  Same with the walking shoes.  Whatever I did, it wasn’t enough or often enough or whatever.

 

I make no secret that I have issues with depression.  When my depression is bad, one of the things that is particularly hard for me is talking on the phone.  I explained this to her and said that I could send her notes, but I wasn’t going to call.  She called anyway.  When I didn’t call back, she would call Brent or get the admin at her apartment to email me.  She didn’t respect my boundaries.

 

Now, lots of people in my life have failed to respect my boundaries.  I’m not exactly the world’s greatest enforcer of my personal space and preferences.  It is only too easy for me to succumb to the guilt of disappointing someone.  Fine.  But apparently I have decided that her particular manipulations are not going to work on me.  I will deal with her on my own terms.

 

And I don’t think my terms are that horrible.  I send her cards and gifts on her birthday and Christmas.  Every once in a while, I drop her another note.  But I have chosen to keep her at a distance.

 

Since I moved, I sent her a change of address note.  She called and left me a message.  I called her back and did not reach her (she has no answering machine).  I dropped her a note to that effect.  She left me another message.  I sent her Christmas package.  My mom, who has been talking to her more lately because she is realizing life is short after my uncle’s recent passing, called to say that my aunt wants me to call.  (My mom totally gets why I’m not doing it.)  Then I got a text from one of the staff at my aunt’s place.  I texted back that I sent another note.  This is the line:  I will not call.

 

It’s petty.  A better person than I am would just suck it up and call.  It isn’t that big a deal.  And yet it is.  I am tired of my no not being respected.  And maybe this one place where I am letting my no be no will help with all the other places.

 

 

Another thing I'm not going to do...

For some number of years now, I have made Vision Boards around now about what I want in the year to come.  I’m not making one this year.

 

It’s not because I learned that putting anything fitness related on my vision board was asking for disaster.  (The year I wanted to ride another century on my bike was the year my forearms stopped working.  The year I put a tree pose on it was the year I got kicked out of yoga teacher training…)  It’s not because I didn’t meet most of my goals.  I did read nearly all of those books from my to-read shelf each year plus a bunch of extras.  I used up tons of leftover yarn and other craft supplies.  I wrote many many words in those empty journals depicted on past boards.

 

I still, of course, want to work out and read the out-of-control stack of books and make stuff.

 

What I don’t want is anything like more pressure.  I do not want anything that even smells like it might be like a goal.

 

I don’t hate goals.  I mean, I help people meet their goals as a job.  Goals are often useful.  I know eleventy billion techniques for setting and meeting them.

 

But right now, in my life, it needs to be about being and not doing.  It needs to be about the unexpected and the possible.  It needs to be about what feels right at the time.

 

No, I don’t mean that I am going to lie around in my crazy socks eating grapes and reading comic books while the house becomes buried in crumbs, my family runs out of clean underwear, and all the bathrooms have empty spools on the toilet paper holders with a full roll perched helpfully on top.  I’m not sure I could be that irresponsible if I tried.  I’m not going to stop making dinner or going to work or even reading difficult books to improve my brain.  I’m just not going to do it on an artificially imposed schedule.

 

I have a vision for next year that involves a lot more happiness and a lot less ticking of preordained boxes.  (No, I won’t give up ticking boxes, even if I have to write stuff on a list after I’ve done it.  It is one of my joys in life.)  I have a vision that I trust myself to grow at my own pace, in my own time.

 

If I decide that I need accountability (to whom?  I am a grown-up, damn it!), I can make a different kind of board, one that shows what I chose to spend my time on, what happens when I let myself dream in the moment instead of planning ahead all the time.

 

Whatever it is I do with the next year, I think it will surprise me.  I also hope it delights me.

Thanks, but no thanks...

Experts in health and psychology and even my mom agree that gratitude is supposed to be good for us.  So I tried.  Every day in my journal I wrote down something I was grateful for.  In November this year, I made it more than a few days taking a picture of something I was grateful for and making sure to post it to my Facebook feed.  Then I got sick and it trailed off.  I didn’t miss it.

 

Here’s the thing:  it does not work for me.  I do not feel more joy when I practice gratitude.  Not even a little.  At best I get a sense of accomplishment from ticking off a box on the Great To-Do List In The Sky. 

 

At worst, I get an upsurge in depression.  It works like this.  I am a person with lots of good things in my life.  I am healthy, housed, employed, and fed.  I have dear family and dear friends.  And I am depressed.  The Depression Monster starts to whisper (all right, scream) at me, “What kind of horrible person are you that you are depressed in the face of so many good and wonderful things?  There is something seriously wrong with you.  You suck…”  The monster can go on in that vein indefinitely, but I won’t because it is not only depressing, but also boring.

 

It’s easy to poke holes in other people’s theories.  What’s hard is doing the work to figure out what would be better.  So I’ve been kicking ideas around to see what, in fact, gives me more joy.

 

I found two things.  One is beauty.  Insert Keats quote here (he even makes the connection; maybe I should have paid more attention in class?).  I can’t explain why I take zillions of photos of flowers, but I do find them beautiful and it does, over time, give me joy.  This is also one of the reasons I love to go to art museums.  Over time, the daily unbeautiful routine of laundry and cooking and errands depletes my beauty reserves and I go to fill them up again.

 

The other is humor.  Back when my depression was worse, I had my own stress response in the vein of fight-or-flight.  It may sound familiar:  laugh or cry.  Crying has its purpose and its place, but most of the time, I try to choose laughing.  (I used to tell the funny stories about the time I spent in the hospital for my depression, but somehow other people found them stressful…)  I will never repent from my habit of silly jokes and puns.  It shifts my brain into a much different place, the one where ordinary traffic cones become Orange Witch Hats and have adventures.  Here, for example, is the OWH Motorcycle Club out for a ride this morning.

 

I am not an expert.  I’m not even my mother.  But I do know what works for me.  So I’ve had enough gratitude practice (despite being very grateful for the many blessings of my life), thanks very much.  I’ll be out there somewhere taking photos and laughing instead.