Spoiled, and lazy

I haven't posted anything for awhile. To be quite candid, this time of year is a bit of a downer for me. I love summer, love the simplicity of it, love the long days. School starts, and I suddenly find myself drowning in a deep pool of melancholia. The kid's getting older. I'm getting older. The world is in sorry shape, the economy continues to founder in spite of what MSM tells you, and I'm pretty much expecting that in my lifetime, my homeland will be overtaken by hostile forces.

So. You'll see why I've been biting my tongue. Nobody wants to read that sort of thing. I'm the kind of person who sends others scurrying away from the water cooler when I approach.

I'm still in that low place some days, but I had an enjoyable moment recently when I was re-reading an old classic from high school. George Orwell's 1984 is just as appalling and brilliant as it was when I was 16. I was inspired to read it again, along with some other old titles, because I've run into some pretty common, unimpressive books lately. Some have been freebies on my Kindle, so I guess I should have expected substandard sentence structures and flat characters. But still... Somebody, somewhere, published these books. They can't all have been self-published. One of them was so flagrantly incoherent and non-cohesive that I was tempted to look up the author—and was smacked in the face by review after review (by readers, for what those are worth) that sang the praises of this particular woman and her various self-centered, narcissistic memoirs.

Really? I mean, she wasn't absolutely terrible, but she skipped around, she didn't develop anything fully, the order of events was difficult to follow and often left matters unresolved... It wasn't good writing.

I started dissecting other recent books that had disappointed me... and then I gave up because I'd figured out the problem: I'm a former English major. I have taught some of the most amazing authors, after having been immersed in them, and likely because of that I began years ago to expect greatness from the written word. That's not to say I loved all of them, but constant exposure to true talent caused me to raise my standards across the board, regardless of writing style, point of view, or syntax. I'm not a fan of Tolkien, but I can appreciate his flair for description. I never liked Poe, but he could create a macabre setting better than almost anyone. Steinbeck's characters have stayed strong in my mind for decades. Welty painted a warm, slightly uncomfortable picture of the South.

My point is that the classics have become classic for good reason—at least most of them. Those guys and gals could write. They were masters of the language, and they understood that every aspect of writing matters. It isn't enough to be emotive; fantastic word choices won't save a poor plot. Characters I find to be unbelievable will become characters I don't care about enough to finish reading the book.

So you see why I've been spoiled. Poor literature is beneath me. Life is too short. And the lazy part of the post title? I've reached middle age now, and I've grown more choosey about how I spend my time. I've always been a believer in reading a book I love many times instead of trying to read as many different books as possible. These days, I feel even more strongly about that. My favorites? I've revisited them over and over. Some of those more recent releases? There are some great ones, but a whole lot of them are pretty shallow and temporary, and I'm decided that I don't have the energy to bother finishing them once I've determined that they're lacking. Which, according to my way of thinking, doesn't make me truly lazy—just discerning and decisive.

I suppose if I'm going to be spoiled, then this is a more desirable form of it than most.

The winter of my discontent

It's been a rough few weeks. Nothing monumentally bad has happened, really. Yet there have been hours spent first asking, then whining, then fighting with insurance company representatives (Highmark, this means you. Quit running all those @!?*&# cutesie televisions ads with blue hands, and use my premiums to actually cover me for a change, you schmucks). There have been winter storms and scary, slush-covered roads to screw up plans. There have been more phone calls and visits to downtown, to try to wade through the unbelievably archaic, poorly organized property tax assessment system. We're smack-dab in the middle of the ugliest time of year, and I can't find a green leaf to save my life. Everyone is sick of being inside at my house (well, not so much my son, who loves inside especially when it's filled with Legos that stab my feet and clog the sweeper...) And the headlines? The country? The world? Bad. Bad. Bad. Long story short, I've been stumbling a bit. I don't think it's only me; it seems the whole world is feeling rather testy with itself and everything around it.

It's quite defeating, when efforts go unrewarded, when what should stand instead must be delayed, or changed a bit, or altered dramatically to meet ever-crumbling circumstances. Expectations? It seems, some days, as if they can't be set low enough.

I was really hitting a wall today. Gray day, gray mood. Dim light, more dim thoughts. Bleak bleak bleak. So I took a hot shower, preparing to pity myself. A funny thing happened, though: I started to cheer up. I just couldn't sustain the bleakness, and I ended up thinking about other things. I decided I'd make some fresh coffee when I finished showering, and from that point on, I just kept moving farther from the bleakness. It was a relief, stepping out of that tedious, exhausting landscape of grim self-absorption.

Speaking of books, someone gave me a great one (thanks, Cari!) and I'm re-reading it already. (I'm never able to fully absorb a book the first time through.) The author's gist seems to be that we must deliberately, daily pursue a thankful attitude toward God and everything He's created, and that this thanks is manifested in blessings—not lottery blessings, but a blessedly new perspective that allows us to see God more fully, to see everything in light cast by Him. The author really struggles some days to embrace this way of thinking; it's not an easy, automatic thing for her in any way, at least not at first, and it's especially challenging for her in the midst of trials.

But it's got me thinking that if we must strive to make deliberate choices to be thankful (and I believe we do), then perhaps we must also be equally, stubbornly determined about the other end of the spectrum... Meaning, to my twisted thinking, that the opposite, ungrateful, cheerless end of the spectrum is just as difficult to maintain. Right? Wouldn't that be illustrated by my easily distracted, cheerier shower-and-coffee self? It's hard work to be happy—and it's also hard work to remain miserable. Yes?

Does that theory hold water at all? I'm hoping it does, because I've been hanging out on the dark end of the gratitude rainbow for too long, and I am hoping that this break in my personal barometer is going to stick around; I simply don't have the energy to stay irritable and/or furious with everyone any longer—not even those &*#@?!! decision-makers at Highmark.

(Well, I might need to keep working on that. I just checked, and I still have some energy for Highmark...)

Feel-good stuff

We've been doing plenty of reading here at our home. Summer is great for that, you know. Not to mention, since a lengthy to-do list for our newly purchased house cannot peaceably coexist with a cushy vacation budget, reading allows us little escapes via the back yard and our imagination...

So my son and I were reading together (taking turns, but mostly me) and one of the mystery stories we read featured a slightly silly story about a scientist mom and her inquisitive daughter, studying penguins during an oil spill. In the story, the daughter explained to a friend that the oil-soaked penguins try to preen their feathers, and even if they've been bathed, they still find and ingest enough oil to sicken and often kill them. In addition, the spilled oil, the baths and the extra preening strip away the necessary, binding oils on their skin and feathers—the very stuff that seals their coats and keeps the penguins warm in freezing water.

Oil-soaked, oil-poisoned, too-cold penguins. That's bad. And the solution? The scientist mom designed a pattern for penguin sweaters. The kids publicized the situation and the pattern. Knitters all over the world responded, and sent the tiny sweaters... and it worked! Penguins were saved!

Nice story, I thought. Whatever. Couldn't happen.

But it could! It did. My son kept reading and found sections in the back detailing true stories that inspired the fictionalized ones we'd read. You can see for yourself! penguins

And then, our searching on YouTube (which was carefully filtered by me, of course) brought forth another gem: swimming

You have to watch almost all the way through, to see the little creature be lifted out. Make certain you have your sound turned up, because its utterance is the best part.

Watch them both, and I dare you to not say "Awwwwwww" at least once while viewing.

Balance in a world of agonies

I've been reading a book I borrowed from my dad: My War by Andy Rooney. Yes, the same Andy Rooney who's on 60 Minutes, or used to be—I haven't seen that show in ages so I'm uncertain as to whether Andy still offers his curmudgeonly commentaries there. Anyway, it's an interesting, sometimes funny, often brutal and upsetting account of Andy's time as a war correspondent during WWII.

A first-hand account of what someone sees during bloody wartime makes for some pretty awful stories. I wouldn't say the book is fun to read, because it's not. Parts of it are fun, parts are entertaining (his opinionated reports on George Patton and Ernest Hemingway are downright laughable), and parts of it are stomach-turning because they include factual accounts of death scenes I couldn't imagine in my worst nightmare.

Why am I reading this book? Well, I need to know more about American history, for one thing; I seem to be the member of my family most lacking in general historical knowledge. For another, I like Andy Rooney's style; I admire his succinct and sometimes caustic delivery. Lastly, I live in such an innocent little suburban bubble that I feel the need to expose myself to reality. Unpleasant, messy reality.

That sort of reality doesn't exist only in the past, as you well know. It's all around us. You can't turn on the news without hearing of death and destruction, fire and floods, murders and terrorists. Our world is a scary place. I can tune out and live in my bubble, but in order to exist in our culture, I have to expose myself to news coverage at least somewhat, especially if I want to know when the snowstorm is coming.

I guess if we want to live a balanced life, we need a little bit of both worlds: the dangerous place all around us versus the good place where most of us are blessed to be regularly. I read a book like the Andy Rooney account, and then I read an easier, happier, more escapist novel that gives me a little boost. Recently, I re-read The Secret Garden. That's a feel-good kind of story, and pretty much the antithesis of a war memoir.

I try to take the same approach to daily media consumption. Do I need to know that there are people in the world who are capable of burying a child alive? Is it necessary to hear that another drug deal went bad and someone was shot in the face? Must I be advised of a deadly dog attack, see pictures of a vandalized cemetary, or know the details of a little boy's drowning in a septic tank?

I don't know. I certainly don't want this information. Yet neither do I want to live so blissfully and ignorantly that I'm unaware of the fallen world around me. If I don't hear the bad news, perhaps the video of a soldier's homecoming won't touch me as deeply. If I'm never reminded of the evil that surrounds us, perhaps I'll forget to teach my child wariness of odd strangers or unfamiliar dogs. If I don't read the stories of tremendous casualties during combat, I might never truly appreciate a serviceman's duty done well, or the scars that service leaves.

We have to find balance. We have to be careful, because what you put in your mind stays there. If you fill it with gore, violence, and hatred, it will consume you. Likewise, if you fill it with mindlessness, with too many new cars and fashion and man-made fluff, it's probable you'll lose touch with real priorities. Lord knows it's easy to do that, with our silly, selfish, overly-comfortable lifestyles. It's important to read the comics; it's also important to read the headlines, the features stories.

I filter everything that comes into my world—books, papers, magazines, television, movies. You can't take something out once it lives in your mind. Be selective. Be perceptive. If something feels disturbing and wrong, walk away. I will forever be haunted by a taped 911 cell phone conversation I heard on a news show years ago: the last words of a woman who'd mistakenly driven off a bridge and into water, where she foolishly called 911 for help instead of getting out of the car immediately... That's a phone conversation I never wanted to hear, and it will never be out of my head.

Balance is difficult to achieve. I don't think I'll ever get it exactly right. I'm trying. Meantime, we watched It's a Wonderful Life the other night; it was nice to go there, and take a break from liberating the French countryside.

(Sorry—this is about as far from a light, Christmas-y post as you can get. But hey, Christmas is still almost two weeks away! Plenty of time left to be jolly! Now, where are those jingle bells!?)

A costly indulgence

I used to read a lot—because I loved to, because I had to (for schooling and then for my job), because it was a great way to learn and be entertained and pass the time. I’d frequently read more than one book at a time, and had no trouble keeping up with multiple plot lines, a variety of characters, etc. It was lovely.

Then I became a mother. There was still time for reading at first, but often it was material related to babies, lots of nonfiction and instructional volumes, and very rarely was anything consumed in a cover-to-cover manner. Most free time was spent catching up on sleep. And after sleep was no longer at such a premium, then I was no longer in the habit of reading for fun, and I just sort of forgot to pick it up again. The child eventually became mobile, which meant there were alarmingly few opportunities to really do anything other than pick up messes, childproof the house, set up safety gates, and the like. Even when the boy napped, I fell into my typical OCD patterns and frittered away the time with de-cluttering and tidying tasks. Or promptly fell asleep.

Now, he’s 3. He no longer naps, at least not on most days. And I’ve tried really hard thus far not to park him in front of the TV too much. And I’m his playmate. He wants to play, to imagine scenarios, to act out silly stories, to tell and read stories, to tell me about what he saw in the woods with Daddy. He’s alternately frustrating and maddening, and then so sweet and dear that I am tearful. And he wants my time. And I already leave him to entertain himself while I do laundry, or unload dishes, or get dinner ready, or make stupid but necessary phone calls.

I’ve tried to read books a few times recently. And each time, I’ve completed the book in question and have retained most of what was in it. But it causes problems: if the book is good, then I want to read it until it’s done. Even if the kiddo wants to play. Even if it’s late and I should be sleeping. Even if the kitchen is a mess and food is drying on the plates and the cat hasn’t been fed and it’s bath night…I still want to read that #!*@&$ book. So I get snappy and short-tempered with my child, and we eat hot dogs for supper, and dirty clothes pile up and I end up swatting at the cat because he’s meowing too much for his food, the beast.

It just louses up everything, having a good book to read. I’m trying like mad to finish one now, a really great, LONG book about Lewis and Clark that my dad lent me, and it’s not something I’d ever pick out but it’s really interesting and enriching and thought-provoking and by golly I have got to finish it because it’s making me crazy. And then I hurry through to get it finished, to get my normal boring life back with my happier kid and cleaner house and balanced meals, and then I keep thinking that I missed a lot because I read it so fast… and then I want to read the thing again.

You see, don’t you, that I just can’t read books yet. So, think twice before recommending anything to me. You see now how it seriously disturbs my groove. ; )