Buy my Kid's Zines!

 My kid has several zines for sale. I star in one of them, the one called "Sleepy Little Town." The red, orange, and yellow ones are the first three chapters of his werewolf comic

Get'em while they're hot!

This is MAGA

So here's a typical MAGA reaction to the SC decision upholding the 14th Amendment:

BUT the human wave attack has taken another form. Not only women performing birth tourism, but in China’s case doing that factory style. And in many ways, too. There have now been found more than one literal “factory” where Chinese citizens are having children via surrogate and raising hundreds of kids in various institutions throughout the land.

This is similar, apparently, to several conservative posts. Apparently some MAGA news outlet has started this rumor, and now every MAGA blogger and "thinker" is parroting it.

This is who is currently running our country. Or, I guess, not so much running it as driving it off a cliff. 

Please. Enough.

The 14th Amendment Upheld

Yesterday the Supreme Court (packed with right-wing radicals by Trump and MAGA) upheld the 14th Amendment -- just barely. Birthright citizenship is upheld for now.

MAGA conservatives are upset about this. "Since when is someone born in this country automatically a citizen?" one of them asked. (Since 1868. So we know when they think America was Great Before -- 1857, apparently.)

I'd comment on the astonishing ignorance here, except the decision was 6-3. Those three SC justices -- Alito, Gorush, and Thomas -- are not ignorant. What are they basing their dissent on?

They're pretending it's the definition of "domiciled," but c'mon. They're worried about immigrant babies, same as MAGA conservatives. But which kind of babies? Non-Aryan babies. (Also anything but straight cis babies, but that's another post.)

Honestly, they're not even pretending anymore.

Whaaat!

The off-leash dog park near my house is finally open!

It's too hot to go there in the morning, because there's no shade from the trees, which are all along the west and nw side of the off-leash area.  looks like in the afternoon, though, the sun will be behind the trees. We're going to go again around 7:30 tonight.

Woooo!

Oof

Today was the first day it was really hot when I took my dog to the dog park at dawn. Heavy humidity, blasting sunshine, no wind. UGH.

Also, the off-leash area still isn't open, except for the tiny temp park.

I've been looking into SniffSpot, which is apparently private dog parks, where people who own land rent it out for so much an hour. None of these are very close, so I would have to drive some distance. There's also a huge dog park about 20 minutes away, near Lake Wilson. I'm thinking about that too.

Also counting the days until fall. Oof, with this heat.

What do you think, is my cat spoiled?

I made the mistake of putting ice in my cat's water one day when the weather was very hot.

Now she stands by the water and mews hysterically until I put ice in the water. Then and only then will she drink.

Also: she insists on me carrying her to her food dish when she is hungry.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm reading a bunch of stuff to review for my SF book columns. My favorite part of writing these columns is that I get (1) free books and (b) early access to books. Like, for example, I have an advance copy of Audrey Niffenegger's sequel to The Time Traveler's Wife, which I have been waiting to read for literally decades. I also got Claire North's new book, and Laurie Frankel's new book, and --

ANYWAY.

Here's what I have been reading which aren't books for my review columns.

T.J. Klune, We Burned So Bright

A black hole is about to swallow the entire solar system, including Earth. What do you do with your last few weeks? Don and Rodney, who lost their emotionally troubled son some years earlier, make a road trip with his ashes, mourning his loss as well as the end of the world. Good writing here, but don't expect a happy ending.

I've been following Klune since his self-publishing days, and this was readable, but I can't really recommend it, unless you like to feel unhappy.

David Lodge, Changing Places

My favorite book by Lodge is Nice Work, a novel that follows two people, a university lecturer and a captain of industry as they "shadow" one another at work. This lets Lodge compare the two different worlds of the academy and the factory, which lets him have a lot of fun. Here, in this early novel -- which I am reading for the first time, because the public libraries I had access to before never had a copy -- he does something of the same, having a British professor change places with an American professor for six months of one academic year.

The novel was first published in 1975, and is set in 1969. But a lot of the circumstances it concerns itself with (student protests, people fleeing the US to seek abortions in the UK, problems with granting tenure) still apply, or I guess I should say apply again. Lodge seemed mostly to be fascinated with the difference in sexual mores in the two countries -- Britain being more staid, and California more sexually unbound. This part of the two societies is that which interested me least, frankly, and I wish he had spent more time on the differences in the academic worlds, or the different standards of living, or anything except who is fucking who. Though that was probably a big deal to Lodge, back in 1975, I don't know.

The book is also slightly meta, with interviews and news stories and film scripts scattered throughout; and the ending isn't an ending. The book just quits.

Anyway. Readable, but not as good as Nice Work.

Lauren Hough, Monster of a Land

In this non-fiction book, Hough refits a van into a camper of sorts, and with her dog Woody Guthrie sets off to follow in the footsteps of John Steinbeck, driving around America with her dog. I love road trip books, and books with dogs, and Travels with Charlie, so I snapped this one up.

As with Steinbeck's book, the real subject matter here is America and its people. Steinbeck ended up down in New Orleans, where the schools were being integrated and people were yelling hateful things at six year olds. But before that, he talked to a lot of people and saw a lot of the country. I especially enjoyed his time in Texas.

Hough, who starts in Texas, also talks to people. She ends up in Colorado, spending an isolated week at a lake and realizing she's lonely -- weird, because mostly she doesn't like people. As she travels through the high plains of the Dakotas, Montana, and a bit of Idaho, she meets a lot of people who are also living out of their vans or cars, and a couple who are walking around the country on foot. Student loans and a broken economy are the main culprits, though Hough admits that substance abuse plays its part. She also meets an Evangelical family (Idaho) where the kids are clearly being abused.

The dog is great, and Hough has some important points to make. I would have liked more of the trip, though, to be honest.

Fair warning, I had terrible nightmares after reading this one straight through, all in one day.

Lisa Unger, Darkness My Old Friend

This one is a mystery novel. I think I must have read another book in the series -- not this one -- because some of the characters and the setting seem familiar to me. It's set in The Hollow, a small community in upstate New York, with a small enough population that pretty much everyone knows everyone else.

It's a little too well written and complex to be a mystery novel, if you know what I mean. But there is a mystery: a missing woman in the past, and a missing woman in the present, plus a guy who used to be a cop and, having retired, is now taking care of the people who live around him. He's the one who acts as the private detective. It reminds me a little of Tana French, except her writing is more compelling.

The characters are well done. The pacing is a bit slow, and the mystery is pretty dark (hence the title, I guess). I liked it well enough that I've put a couple more of Unger's books on hold.

Rumer Godden, Greengage Summer

I can't decide if I like Godden or not. I read another one of her books a month or so ago, In This House of Brede, which I remember being entranced by. That's a story about a woman who joins a community of nuns, and how it goes for about a decade. I like hearing about worlds I will never enter, which was part of the attraction of that one.

This was follows four British children, ages four to sixteen, who end up stranded at a French hotel while their mother is in a French hospital with what sounds like sepsis. It's set six or seven years after the end of WWII, I think. In any case, there's a French orphan in his midteens whose mother apparently went with soldiers, leaving behind this kid and a younger half-sister, who the boy has lost track of.

There's quite a bit of French dialogue, which I enjoyed being able to read, and a bank robber, and French cuisine. A kind of a Lord of the Flies summer -- no one is taking care of any of the children here, not the British kids and not the French orphan. They have to take care of themselves, while bad things are clearly happening around them.

I enjoyed this, but it hasn't convinced me to read more Godden, which is a shame, because she wrote about a billion books. If I liked her a lot, that would give me reading  fodder for quite some time.

Leonora Chu, Little Soldiers: An American Boy, A Chinese School, and the Race to Achieve

Leonora Chu is a reporter, now based in Berlin. Back when she wrote this, she and her husband were living in Shanghai, where they decided to put their three-year-old son in a prestigious local preschool. The book is about Chinese schools, with that school as one example and less selective schools as others. Chu is appalled by the (to be fair, appalling) authoritarian nature of the pre-school, in which kids are manhandled into obedience, threatened and force-fed and shamed.

But she has to admit, after she looks at how Chinese children behave as they continue their schooling, that this appalling harshness leads to good results. At one point, she compares an American middle-school math class to a Chinese middle-school math class. Clearly, the Chinese students are better able to think about math, to solve problems, and to learn. But are they better at humanities? Well, yes. They're better at that too. Having been forced to memorize poems as very young children, they have a richer, deeper knowledge base to work with. Also, Chinese schools demand a lot from their students, and (sometimes) get it. 

Chu does show us what happens to the school children who can't do the work, or who come from bad schools, and how these kids have almost no chance to succeed in China. In particular, she writes about the children who grow up separate from their parents, raised by grandparents in the country while the parents work long hours in some city, or at transient labor. These children, whose grandparents are often illiterate, mostly do not do well in the Chinese system. I'm not sure that America does any better with its poor or difficult children though.

This is very readable, and Chu presents the evidence fairly. I think her thesis is that Chinese schools turn out children who are afraid to stand out or to defy authority. I'm not sure that's what her evidence shows, though. If you're interested in education, you might have a look at this one.

Weather Report

We've had a (relatively) cool summer so far, with highs in the 80s. But come July, the weather forecast says we're going to get into the 90s. UGH.

Today is cool and damp, because of all the rain we've been having. 

Fourteen more weeks of summer.

Junti in 2020

 My little cat came up in my FB memories. She was so pretty.

Piano Update

I am making progress!

I still am just teaching myself -- no formal lessons yet. I acquired this set of books as well as a couple other books and am working my way through them. My musical ignorance is a problem (what does 'key of G' mean?). The internet is a little bit of help.

I might have told y'all this story before, but we had no music at all in the house when I was growing up. My father had a transistor radio which he would use to listen to baseball games on, but not music. No music at school either, not in Louisiana. There was band in high school, but I didn't play an instrument. 

In high school, I was bused to the girl's school in Jefferson Parrish, which was about an hour away. So I got to listen to the radio (played by the bus driver) for two hours a day.

When I was about fourteen, my father bought a sound system for some reason, which included a stereo and a turntable, except we had no records except the one that came with, Johnny Horton's Greatest Hits. After a while, I bought Bridge Over Troubled Waters. How did I know who Simon and Garfunkel were? I can't remember. Maybe those bus rides?

Anyway! My point here is that I grew up very nearly musically illiterate, so learning even on this very basic level is a revelation. Also, fascinating.

I'm still thinking about signing up for formal lessons.

My garden

I'm growing herbs, a fig tree, rose bushes, and a watermelon in my raised bed garden. Some of these are in the plastic crates that were formerly used for recycling -- when the city gave us wheeled carts instead, they said we should repurpose the plastic crates. The rest are a DIY wooden beds I filled with dirt bought in sacks from the local Harps.

So far the rose buses are doing wonderfully, as are the herbs.  I have some tiny watermelons on the watermelon vines.

Tomatoes don't do well here because the squirrels eat them off the vine before they can ripen. I'm hoping that won't happen with the watermelons.

I've always wanted to grow peas. Maybe next year!

My first watermelon!

Iran War

I'm still avoiding news and most of social media, but I saw that Trump has actually lost the Iran War? He lost it?

Or did he just get bored and wander away, and so the war was lost that way?

MAGA, man.

(Fox Goggles)

Gender Wars

I was reading Fraser Sherman's post about how men enforce masculinity, or rather toxic masculinity. It led me to thinking about how a certain kind of conservative views gender -- specifically, that there is only one correct way to perform a given gender. 

I was thinking of a specific conservative I know, who said if their daughter put makeup on their son (the daughter was about five, the son about three) the makeup would be in the trash and both kids would get 'whooped,' to use their language.

Why such an over-reaction to normal play on the part of their kids? Especially since -- according to that kind of conservative -- gender is natural and fixed? If you can't change someone's gender, why do we need to terrorize children into performing their gender properly?

Sherman says this:

As I’ve discussed earlier, part of this is the toxic-masculine insistence that there’s only one way to be a man. Because if there are alternatives, then that concept of manhood — it doesn’t matter if we’re toxic, we’re guys, we can’t help it! — becomes invalid.

That's what's going on, I think. This sort of person has been, themselves, abused into performing gender this one specific way. They've been damaged. They have had a neurosis installed in them by their society or their family or both. This neurosis, this damage, has left them terrified of gender not being performed in one specific way. 

What are they doing about this damage? Well, they're damaging their children in exactly the same way. Anything else is just too frightening for them.

It's why they insist on trying to compel everyone else to damage their children as well: because if anyone is performing gender in a way that doesn't match the "right" way, then they are reminded of their own damage. Maybe they are even forced to notice how they're damaging their children. Guilt and terror follow.

Sherman also points out that not being a specific sort of masculine -- or a specific sort of feminine -- terrifies them because they don't have an identity outside of that specific gender. What are they, if they aren't "man" or "woman"? They can't just be a human. They can't just be some self not defined by other people. The neurosis doesn't let them be that. 

For example: it doesn't bother me that other people perform gender some way I don't. Like, some people wear makeup and have their nails done. Some people wear their hair long or short. Some people wear skirts and some have earrings. Some people modify their bodies with plastic surgery. Some people spend their lives having kids, and some spend their lives at beauty pageants. I don't do any of that, but why would I care if other people do? I'd have to be neurotic to care about that.

I should feel sorry for the damaged people, I suppose. 

But I don't. When you're damaged, the way to react is to that damage is to seek therapy, or whatever else you need to do, to heal your own trauma. 

The thing not to do? Damage others in a vain attempt to make yourself feel better.

Raeburn Miller

I was browsing the blog and came across this post I wrote 20 years ago now.

Part of it is about assessment in academic classes, and part of it is about Raeburn Miller, who had enormous influence on my life.

He died in 1990, I see from the internet. I was wondering if anyone else remembers him? A good poet and a great teacher. 

World Events

I haven't really been paying attention to the news for the past week or so, because I needed a break. It's been so depressing. But apparently Trump is turning the White House into a trailer park. And God is reacting by sending algae and giant storms and killing heat.

Also he's won the Iran War yet again. This makes like eleven times, doesn't it?

Also some sort of important sports event happened in New York.

In other news, I have reached the point in my piano lessons where I am introduced to sharps and I've got blisters on my thumbs because the way I hit Middle C (with both of them) hits right at the juncture of nail and flesh.

 

Fig Season!

It's fig season again!

(In the background, the teapot my kid bought me, which looks like the Frog King)

Wait, I AM an Adult

I just re-read yesterday's post and realized something even weirder than my kid being an adult. 

I'M an adult.

Like, I do the things I'm supposed to do. 

I pay my bills. I walk the dog. I do the laundry every Monday. I have this rule I follow, which is that I always leave a clean kitchen before I go to bed -- that means all the dishes in the dishwasher, the sink scrubbed out, the floor swept. I take out the trash and recycling, and I put the bins out on bin night. I compost.

I practice my piano every day. I write every day. I go to the library every Sunday and take all my books back on time. I go to bed at a reasonable hour and wake up early every morning.

I even eat salads! Like an adult!

How did this happen?

I have raised an adult

The kid and his husband have flown off for a week in the Outer Banks (with the husband's family). I had almost nothing to do with any of this -- the kid didn't need my advice for booking the flights, or renting the car. They didn't need my help getting to the airport. I didn't have anything to do with their packing.

I'm feeding the cat while they're gone. That's it.

My kid is an adult. 

(I remember taking the kid to the Outer Banks when they were about two, staying with my family. That little little kid in the sunhat has become an adult. I hope he remembers to wear his sunhat at the beach. You will not believe the restraint I am practicing to keep from saying that to him.)

Read This Thread at BlueSky

 Read this thread about why Conservatives oppose certain treatments and approve of others.

There are two pillars of conservative medicine: One is eugenics, the other is a hatred of science as a method of discerning objective truths and a need to replace scientific truth-finding with declarations from conservative authorities.

 

Piano Update

I have assembled instruction books and Dr Skull's ancient Kutzweil and am busily engaged in teaching myself to play the piano. 

Dr Skull, who had actual piano lessons as a kid, cannot stop himself from backseat teaching. Since I don't understand a single thing he tries to tell me, this is doing no good, but no real harm either.

I should probably find someone to give me lessons. But I'm enjoying the process so far, so I'll stick with this for a bit.

My Yard is Full of Fireflies

I dislike summer intensely, as you all know, but I must admit I love this particular season, when -- thanks to the green space behind my house -- my yard is filled with fireflies.

They're so pretty. Also, it's fun to watch the neighbor's cat trying to catch them.

Shamus just ignores them.

Spotted on Tumblr

"I don't think anyone has won a war as many times as Trump has won the Iran war. MAGA!"

Hey! Who Knew?

This guy tells us about a study which shows that cooking meals -- especially if you're bad at it, like I am -- helps stave off dementia. Who knew!

Money Makes You Miserable

So ever since I quit Twitter and have nearly quit FB, I've been spending my social media time on Tumblr or Reddit. (I highly recommend Tumblr, btw, which is the best social media site still in existence.)

Recently on Reddit someone asked "People who have become rich, what's something poor people misunderstand about money?"

I knew they were looking for 'advice' like, "If you stop buying coffee and save that $5.00 instead," or "Getting a second job will" or "cook your own meals because," but as someone who used to be poor and who is now newly rich (okay, sort of rich), I decided to chime in. I said this:

That having money makes life much easier. I was lower middle class most of my life. Now I have enough money. It's just amazing. I don't have panic attacks when we have medical problems, I can buy fresh fruit, high gas prices annoy me, they don't destroy me.

Anyone who says money can't buy happiness is trying to sell you something.

I got lots of likes -- more than I have ever received on a Reddit post -- but I also go a lot of argument.

Money does not buy happiness, people told me, because look at all the miserable rich people.

Money does not buy happiness, they said, because it can't buy family or friends.

Money does not buy happiness, because money actually makes people UNhappy.

Also, my favorite: "Poor people can buy fresh fruit lol"

My favorite was the comment that accused me of being out of touch with what being poor was like. 

Anyway, I'm here to say that while it is true money can't buy a happy family or cure your depression, it can certainly go a long way toward alleviating anxiety, which apparently was 90% of my depression. 

Also, being able to buy all the fresh fruit I want is nearly as nice as being able to buy all the books I want. 

I've certainly known rich people who are assholes (I'm thinking of two specific people here), but they also seem pretty happy. I guess because they think their wealth vindicates their contempt and bigotry? I don't know.

Does having money make people happy? What do y'all think?

What I'm Re-Reading Now

Mostly I have been re-reading Kage Baker's Company series, which if you like science fiction and revolutions, you should give it a go. It's about people chosen as tiny children by a corporation in the 24th century to be rebuilt into immortal cyborgs. The immortality process only works on children younger than five or six, but then those children grow up to work for the Company. An immortal workforce that you don't need to pay! Who never get sick and who will never be old!

The Company has them collecting works of art, rare or extinct species of plants and animals, even various humans whose culture or genetic material will vanish through time. It's all in the service of making the Company and its stockholders even richer than they are, though it's sold to the little cyborg children as preserving things that would otherwise be lost: one of our main characters, for example, the botanist Mendoza, hunts for plants that would otherwise go extinct, while meanwhile attempting to breed a type of maize that will be nutritionally complete, using the maize plants that get lost as climate and farming practices change. 

The Company looks like the good guys at first -- the children who become cyborgs are rescued from terrible situations (wars, earthquakes, the dungeons of the Inquisition), and the work they grow up to do does seem important. As the series progresses, though, we come to see the Company's true motives; and how they handle cyborgs who rebel; and what life is like for someone who is hundreds of thousands of years old. There is also a romance between Mendoza and a different sort of cyborg, one who is not immortal.

These are really good books, and Kage Baker, having finished the Company novels, was starting two new series, one set in a fantasy world and the other set on Mars. Sadly, she died of cancer in 2010, while in her early 50s, leaving those series only barely begun. Still, very much worth reading. Start with Garden of Iden, or else The Bird of the River.  

My kid's Comic

 Are you reading my kid's comic? Read my kid's comic here!

Weather Report

The humidity right now is 100%. And all week the weather guy says highs from 88 to 90. Ugh, summer has arrived,

Declining Birthrate

This article from the Atlantic (gift link) takes a thoughtful, thorough look at why the world population has slowed its increase and may indeed begin declining by 2055. (We're already no longer at a replacement level.) Read the article, but spoilers: it's educating women and giving them access to birth control, as well as underpaying half our workforce. Who can afford kids when rent is half your income?

I'm not convinced a population decline would be a bad thing, given what damage humans are doing to the global climate. Would the world be better off if there were fewer humans? Like, maybe, a couple billion, instead of nine billion?

On the other hand, it's the large population that makes all the things we (I, anyway) love possible: the internet, books, good food, air conditioning, universities, parks...when there were only a billion of us infesting the planet, life was grim indeed. Could we keep the advanced technology, medical knowledge, long lives, and Netflix if there were only a billion of us?

Not to mention the loss of genetic diversity if most of us stop reproducing. Loss of cultural diversity too. 

Then there's the "how do a billion working age people support four billion elderly?" question. But automation could fix that, I suppose. Agricultural robots, driverless vehicles, arcologies...and maybe we can all work to age 75. Not me, mind you. Future old people.

This is a question for science fiction. Back in the previous century, all the books were about how overpopulation would doom us. I remember all those books about women having nine or ten kids each, blissfully delighted to spend their lives changing diapers and cooking dinner. Nothing about the physical toll that many pregnancies took on a woman. All the authors were men, of course. No one seemed to have any notion that if women had a choice, they might not want ten children, or three, for that matter.

I'm currently re-reading Kage Baker's Company series, written mostly at the start of this century, in which (among other things) a coalition of rogue cyborgs decides to save the planet by getting rid of 'bad' humans -- people from Africa, for example, and people in prison, and people in the military, religious people, violent people, it's a long list. What one person, I mean cyborg, thinks is fine, another might decide to doom. This cyborg coalition thinks the planet will be better off if there's only about half a million humans, all kept safely on reservations built specifically for them.

I'm not too worried about the declining population, is all I'm saying. Though I am worried about what fascist governments might do if they see their populations falling. We're seeing a bit of that from MAGA America already. 

Ironing? Really?

This is brought to you by a Reddit post on ironing pillowcases. And sheets. And duvet covers. Also starching shirts. Do people do this anymore?

My mother had an ironing board and an iron and a huge basket full of clothes she was going to get around to ironing any day now. I used to raid it to steal fabric for the little animals I made and the clothes for my dolls. (I made a lot of stuffed animals, but also shirts and shoes and hats for my dolls. I could never figure out how to make pants, but luckily all my dolls were all babies.)

I do remember her ironing my father's handkerchiefs. He had these big white cotton handkerchiefs, and he carried one every day. Men from the 1950s, it was another world. Anyway, she had to keep him supplied with those, so she would crack out the iron when he was getting low. Oh! And she had this thing she put on a Coke bottle -- a real glass coke bottle -- which had holes in it, so she could sprinkle the laundry while she was ironing it. Whaaaat!

Yes, like this!

When I moved out, I bought myself things that had always been somewhere around the house -- screwdrivers, and tin snips, tape, a mop -- but I never bought an iron and I've never needed one. Once when my mother came to visit, she wanted to iron something, so she went out and bought a travel iron and a little ironing board. But when we moved we left it behind.

Generally I only wear clothes that don't need ironing, like shorts and teeshirts, though I did have a linen shirt once. If you hung it up carefully and let it drip dry, it wouldn't wrinkle until you'd been wearing it five or six minutes. I did love that shirt.

And I remember when I graduated high school, my SIL made fun of me because I hadn't ironed the robe before I put it on. (Could you even iron those things? They were 100% polyester.)

Why would you iron sheets? Does it make them feel nicer?

Do y'all iron? and if so, what?

Considering Piano Lessons

Apparently I have decided not to study the classics after all. So now I am considering taking piano lessons.

When I was five, my neighbor advised my mother to get me piano lessons, since I had been messing about on her piano and I was picking up playing it quickly. "What would you rather do?" my mother asked. "Piano lessons or art lessons?"

I picked art lessons, but now that I have a lot of time and money, why not piano lessons, I'm thinking. There's a place in town that gives lessons to adults.

What do you think? Yeah or nay?

I could not be prouder

My kid found just learned that he has been given an internship for this coming academic year. It was a highly competitive application process, so we're very pleased. Also, it's a paid internship, which makes it even better.

He's going to be researching the archeology and historical management of forest lands on Osage land from pre-history to the present. What he learns will go into a graphic novel (which he will write and draw) aimed mostly at children/young adults -- a way to increase scientific understanding of forest management.

His proposal was brilliant, by the way. I have such a smart kid.

I'll share drawings when he starts making them!

Weather Report

Thunder and rain here. The dog is now afraid of thunder. This is because a few days ago when I walked him over to the park, there was a huge blast of thunder directly overhead, which terrified him.

Supposed to rain all week. I like rain, but it does make taking the dog for his exercise a lot more fraught.

Shamus, worrying about thunder

Whining

I have a cold, or maybe allergies. My ears are stopped up and all my joints hurt.

Wah.

How It Started/How It's Going

 This is what I planned to do with my retirement.

How did it go?

(1) I am reading a lot of books.

(2) I am writing a lot.

(3) No biking so far, but I am taking a lot of walks, mainly because

(4) We did get a puppy, one that requires at least three walks a day

(5) I never, ever get to sleep late -- see (4)

(6) My garden goes well! Though occasionally the dog digs plants up >:(

(7) (8) (9) Not at all. It's not that I don't want to, it's just that we haven't. Maybe this year.

A Day in the Life: Being Retired in Arkansas

I've been retired exactly one year today. What's it like so far?

Spoilers: I love it to pieces. Was it worth working fifty years* for this retiree life in the Boston Mountains? 

I'd have to say yes, mostly because most of those years I was a professor, which was a job I liked a lot. (There were some bad years, and I never quite made enough money, which was pretty stressful.) If I had been working a job I hated for all that time, maybe not.

What do I do with my time all day?

Well, I get up at dawn and take the dog to the dog park. He runs with other dogs and brings me balls to throw him. Then we come home and he goes out into the yard to make sure nothing has been stolen, and I make tea. While I'm drinking tea, I do several puzzles and my Duolingo. This caffeinates me enough that I can start working. Right now I'm working on book reviews for Asimov, so I am either reading for those or writing those.

Around noon, I eat something. Usually a bagel, sometimes a cheese sandwich. I also make lunch for Dr Skull, whose hands still don't function well enough to make his own lunch. (The pain doctor has recommended a neck surgery which might help. We're thinking about it.)

Then I take the dog to the dog park again. He needs to run around with other dogs at least twice a day. If you're considering a border collie, keep that in mind.

In the afternoon, I do things. Like, some days I go to the library. Some days I buy groceries. Once in awhile, we go to the bookstore or Walmart. There's also this cool store in town that sells Japanese imports, or I can cruise the thrift shop. If I don't do any of those, I might make bagels or flatbread or lie on the couch and read. Maybe I do laundry concurrently, or set the Roomba to vacuuming.  (I have to make bread a lot because there is no eatable bread in Arkansas. It is all as sweet and soft as cake.)

Around four, I start supper. If there are leftovers, I can keep reading instead. Or maybe we order in. We have enough money to buy dinner from restaurants! It's great.

After dinner, I do the dishes and then I take the dog for a walk -- either the dog park again, or just around the block. More reading at night, or occasionally television, though right now I seem to have lost interest in watching TV shows.

Sometimes the kid comes over and cooks dinner for us, or we take him and his husband out to eat somewhere. Every Friday we have lunch together at a local Greek place. 

One day this summer we will go to Crystal Bridges and maybe another day to the Botanical Garden. And the kid wants to learn to drive, so we'll have to pencil that in. And there are always medical and vet appointments. Also, I'm growing a tiny garden of herbs, watermelon, and a fig tree.

It's a great life. If I could have one wish, I'd like the dog to get used to sleeping past dawn. Please.

Anyway, retirement for me is 10/10, highly recommend. It really helps that we have money now, though. I wouldn't have been able to retire anywhere this soon without it. People who say money doesn't buy happiness have never been poor, if you want my opinion.

*I got my first 'real' job at 15, working in a snack bar; before that, I had lots of little jobs, mainly babysitting but also delivering papers, my first 'job,' at age nine. Between then and when I started working as a baby professor, I worked in delis and at McDonalds, in a library, and managing that same snack bar, summers, from age 18 to 23. Doing that made me enough money to pay for my undergraduate education, by the way, though I also lived at home most of the time I was in college.

Upsetting Books

So I've read two books back to back this week, both for possible review. Both looked like they would be science fiction, though neither really was.  If you like books that will upset you deeply, these are for you. 

The first, Under Story by Chloe Benjamin, is about scientists, and science, and there's an alternative universe. You see why I thought it was science fiction.

It's also beautifully written, and there's a lot of fascinating detail. The book opens with the point of view character, a scientist who used to study fungi, on her way to McMurdo Station in Antartica, where she is working washing dishes and unloading cargo trucks, things like that. 

As the book develops, we learn about her past, how she came to science, and that there is a husband and a child (not now with her, obviously) in her background. Later we learn that the kid is dead. Also, there's an "arc" visible from McMurdo station, and no one knows what it is. 

Spoilers: it's a place where this universe and another universe touch. In that one, entropy flows the other way. She and her husband (he's a physicist, and shows up to study the arc) use the juncture to travel to the other universe, where they hope they can locate their son before he dies and bring him back to this universe.

So it's a fascinating book and their lives in the other universe, where people are born old and age back to childhood, is fascinating. I think it's the dead kid that makes this one so hard to read. We know he dies, and then when (spoilers) they do find him in the other universe, they can't bring him out of that universe. So he ages back to birth, and we have to watch that. Very upsetting. 

But, again, compelling and wonderfully written. The parts about science and about McMurdo Station are wonderful. I think this one triggered my claustrophobia. I hate it when characters are trapped and can do nothing to save themselves. If you don't have claustrophobia, you might enjoy this one. The kid dying twice is a little hard to deal with, though.

*** ****

The other is upsetting for a different reason. Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke, reminds me of Gone Girl, if you know that novel. The main character, who is our point of view character, Natalie, is a social media influencer, with six kids and a five hundred acre farm in an Idaho valley. She releases videos on Instagram and YouTube, celebrating her existence as a "tradwife." She thanks God for her wonderful children and her wonderful husband who runs the farm while she raises the children, baking her own bread, home-schooling, raising chickens and cooking every meal from scratch.

From the beginning, we see how much of this life is an illusion -- the production team, the nannies who actually care for the children, the farm hands who actually do the farming. We also, almost from the start, recognize that Natalie is an unreliable narrator. She contradicts herself, gives us conflicting information, and seems to be operating mostly from spite. In fact, her entire life seems to be built on spite and childish tantrums. She is a thoroughly unlikeable person.

Then she wakes up in what appears to be 1875, still in the same Idaho valley. The "joke" is that she actually has to become a traditional wife from that era she was cosplaying. Her husband beats her, her kids see how useless she is (four kids, this time), she learns how difficult life is without antibiotics or modern appliances. 

Does she rise to the experience? No, she continues with her spiteful tantrums. We eventually learn what's going on -- she has not, in fact, been transported to 1875 -- but by that point we no longer care. 

I imagine this one sold on the concept -- a tradwife influencer transported back to the time she celebrates as so wonderful, haha, you won't believe what happens next.

But the structure is a mess, and the characters are completely unlikeable. Not just Natalie -- her husband, enamored of the manosphere and lunatic YouTube channels, is equally horrible. The grandparents bankrolling this cosplaying life are horrible: the grandmother is a drunk, the grandfather, a conservative politician, is hateful. The channel Natalie runs is fueled by what she calls "the angry women," liberals, apparently, but who knows, they're also horrible. The kids, the true victims in all of this, have their moments, but it's not enough to carry the book.

It's like being hit with sticks for three hundred pages. Read it if you like that sort of thing, I guess.

A Former Student Gets a Book Deal!

One of my former students (graduated 2012) sent me an email with some great news this morning.

A.T. was a poet when she was in my writing workshops; but she was really good at prose, and I encouraged her to think about writing fiction. Which she did! And now she has an agent and a contract for a duology. It's Romantasy, and those of you who like that genre should definitely pre-order.

It's called The Art of Living Forever, published under the name A. T. Rainach.

I can't tell you how happy this has made me!

From her bio:

A.T. has been telling stories since she could write. She holds a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing and is both a fiction author and a published poet with a love for lyrical language and dark, fantastical worlds. Off the page, she’s a lifelong barrel racer, horse trainer, and full-time wrangler of three feral children. In rare quiet moments, she’s probably reading, adding to her tattoo collection, listening to music, or playing guitar (she admits her enthusiasm exceeds her skill).

Paper Shells Update!

New update on Paper Shells, my kid's new comic.

This is the plotline I helped with -- how to be an English professor in the year 2000.

Dental Work

Several months ago, I had two abscessed teeth pulled and "cadaver bone" put into the empty sockets. Then last Thursday, I had posts screwed into the cadaver bone. In about four more months, I'll have caps put on the screws. 

Presto, new teeth.

But ugh, do you know how much it hurts to have screws put into your bones? 0/10, extremely unpleasant.

Buying Books

Probably my favorite thing about having enough money is I can buy all the books I want now.

To be honest, I pretty much did this already. There were some edge cases, where I wasn't sure I wanted to read the book: I didn't buy those books. But yeah, otherwise...

I still get most of my books from the library, especially since the library here will buy whatever book I ask for. (These days those are usually academic books, or cookbooks, since I love to read cookbooks but I don't want to buy that many of them.) It would be hard to buy as many books as I read, and also this way I can take chances on books -- check out ones that are edge cases, that is.

But yeah, it's nice to see a book I want and start doing the calculus to see if I should buy it and then just say, oh! I can buy books now!

(Brought to you by the collected copies of SAGA which I never read because they were just too expensive, but which I have bought now.)

Parents Who 'Do Their Own Research'

Parents doing their own research -- by which they mean watching YouTube and Instagram videos -- are killing their children.

We know about the refusal to get the measles vaccine, which led to three deaths last year and thousands of cases of sick kids. See also chicken pox, whooping cough, and mumps, among others. Now parents are refusing Vitamin K shots for their newborns, which has led to a least a dozen preventable deaths, and probably many more.

Why are parents refusing the Vitamin K shot? They 'did their own research.'

The parents explained that they had declined the shot for a number of reasons: a concern, based on long-debunked claims, that the shot could cause leukemia; a belief that the shot wasn’t necessary; and a desire to reduce their baby’s exposure to “toxins.”

Also, of course, there's the "natural" fallacy. Why, for thousands and thousands of years, babies did without Vitamin K shots, or vaccines, so obviously.... 

What about the fifty percent child mortality rate we used to have? (That's fifty percent of all infant dying before age five.) Malnutrition, these parents claim. Bad hygiene. Their children play outside and eat right, so obviously....

Much of it is due to Trump and the way he and the GOP party in general handled COVID. It couldn't be that Trump mishandled the epidemic (due to a very real ignorance and lack of experience on his part), so it must be that the CDC and physicians and experts in general are lying to everyone. Why? Well, vaccines are how they make the big bucks, clearly. Also all that profit on Vitamin K shots.

Look, I'm all for kids playing outside and eating well. But to believe that MAGA and Trump are telling you the truth, and everyone in the medical system worldwide is lying to you -- to make a profit -- is just ridiculous. 

To let your infants and children die from things that could be prevented with inexpensive (indeed, sometimes free at the point of service) vaccines and vitamin shots is worse than ridiculous. It's child sacrifice. 

RFK Junior was asked to make a statement saying Vitamin K shots were safe and necessary, by the way. He refused.

“I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Kennedy said.

“That’s exactly the point,” responded Schrier, who [made the request and] is a doctor. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.”

New Comic From the Kid

It's called Paper Shells, and I helped with the university stuff!

To quote his husband: 

It's about domestic abuse, transphobia in the early 2000s, an english professor getting tenure, and TWO (2) whole werewolves called Paper Shells. Make sure to check out the trigger warning but go give it a look!

Go here to read it!

AI and University Teaching

People I know at universities are going back to paper tests written by hand, and what they are finding is the students are doing markedly worse under that system. Previous "good" grades were actually students using AI to write their exams and papers. Without AI, those students are helpless.

It's probably partly that these are COVID students, who got passed during the pandemic even if they did no work at all -- so they did no work. (One of my students told me they took a job during school hours, and just left Zoom open on their laptop.) And when students can pass without doing the work in classes they don't care about (for many, many students, that is every single class) then they don't do the work.

Why would that be? They're paying for these classes, why would they not make at least some effort to learn what's being taught? 

Possibly it's because these students come from Red States, where for the past two decades their parents and their governments have been saying that teachers are mindless liberals, that everything they're teaching is woke propaganda, and that education is worthless. 

Education is a meaningless credential, their parents and their pastors and their governments say. Education is hoops to jump through so that you can get a job. Education is a scam, a Ponzi scheme. That so many of these students then treat university classes like something they can cheat their way through is no real surprise. 

This is despite, or I guess maybe because of, their massive ignorance. (I could tell you stories....)

I'm glad I'm retired for two reasons: having to fail most of my students would be too depressing; and going back to paper exams and writing essays in class means I would have to read their appalling handwriting. 

Ugh. No thanks.

Insomnia

My insomnia is back, ugh. 

For awhile there I was sleeping fairly well, seven or eight hours every night. (The dog wakes me at dawn to go to the dog park, by yapping until I give in and get up.) But the last few nights, I keep falling asleep and then waking up and falling asleep and waking up and so on, all night long.

Also, I have anxiety dreams like you wouldn't believe. Probably that's what's waking me up. There's absolutely nothing to be anxious about -- except the political situation, I suppose -- so I don't know what's up with that.

Side note on that point: gas is $3.89/gallon at the cheap place as of yesterday. It's about that in Fort Smith, which is where I'm seeing all the complaining. Whose fault are these high prices, according to people in Fort Smith on FB? Why, Joe Biden!

What's happening is people are posting about how much it costs to fill up their giant pickups and SUVs and other people are saying, well, back in 2022, when Biden was president....

It's true gas price were high in 2022, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Gas prices are high now because of Trump's ridiculous illegal war against Iran. Somehow one is Biden's fault and the other is Biden's fault as well. 

Don't ask me how they're managing these mental gymnastics.

What I'm Listening to Now

The Small Change Trilogy, Jo Walton, read by John Keating and Heather O'Neil

These are three books -- Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half a Crown -- set in an AU where Britain made peace with Hitler in 1941. FDR was assassinated in his second term, so that Lindberg becomes president just before WWII kicks off. I guess it isn't a WW, since no one except Britain is fighting Hitler; and then they make peace.

In any case, these books are about fascism increasing world-wide, and especially in Britain, so they're apropos for today's events. There's a great and awful bit in the second book, from the POV of an actress, saying all politicians are alike, Churchill and Atlee wouldn't have done anything different from the Farthing group (the fascists that take over Parliament), and the death camps in Germany are just work camps, and anyway none of Britain's business. In the third book, there's some harrowing scenes of fascists marching in London and Jews being stoned.

These are mystery books, in that each book turns around a mystery; but they aren't traditional mysteries. Mysteries are generally conservative works, in that they start with a Utopian space, which is disrupted by crime; and then the space becomes disordered and terrible; and then the police or a private detective or Miss Marple solve the crime, right the wrong, and the world returns to its former Utopian space. However, here, the space being disrupted is far from Utopian, and while the crimes get solved, nothing is made better by the solving of the crime. Indeed, everything gets worse, until the last book, which has, frankly, an unbelievable ending.

These are excellent books, wonderfully narrated. Well worth listening to. Available via Audiobooks.

The Keeper, Tana French, read by Roger Clark

This is the third in the Cal Hooper trilogy, about a Chicago homicide detective who retires to sheep country in Ireland and accidentally adopts/mentors a 13 year old (Trey is 15 in this novel). The setting, a small rural town, is as much a character as anyone else. The cast of characters includes sheep farmers, shopkeepers, ne'er-do-wells, high school students, and Cal himself. Also some great dogs.

Each of the novels contains a mystery, including this one, but honestly I don't read French so much for the mystery as her ability to create characters and place. When you listen to them, also, there are wonderful Irish accents. 

Available via Audiobooks.

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, read by Tony Walker

I may not make it all the way through this one. Jackson writes creepy better than anyone. It's strange, because she also wrote these charming, slightly funny stories about her children (in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons) which are just orthogonal to the horror fiction. Those are also worth listening to, by the way.

Anyway, I'm enjoying this one so far, but man is it creepy. The set up is a professor of haunted houses (or something like that) rents Hill House for a couple of months and goes to live there with these people he hired because they (the people) all of some sort of paranormal events in their background. Like one was living in a house where stones rained down for three days, and another is apparently telepathic, or at least can identify cards without looking at their faces.

There's also a very New England peasant couple. And, of course, Jackson's wonderful voice. I like what I've listened to so far (the first half hour or so) but it's starting to get creepy. This one is available for free on YouTube.

Performing Gender

I have been idly wondering for some time why so many MAGA women have that face -- fat cheeks, small plump eyes, narrow nose, giant lips -- and the long flowing overly styled hair. If you've seen Charlie Kirk's wife out monetizing her dead husband, you've seen the face. It goes with the tiny body and tight clothing.

Kristi Noem has it, too, as do most Fox News anchors. Our governor, Sarah Huckster Sanders, tries for it, but she just doesn't have the body or the bone structure. She also may not have the money.

Turns out that face, also known as Mar-a-Lago face, is a deliberate choice. The hyperwealthy in the GOP camp are buying plastic surgery that makes them look like the MAGA notion of a desirable woman. (The men are also getting plastic surgery -- to make them look like "real men," with a specific jawline, eyes, forehead, and lips; but this isn't about that trend.) Here's an interesting video essay about the phenomenon.

And here's Erika Kirk, before and after:

According to the video essay, this is a thing fascist governments do with their women. It separates them from progressive/non-fascist women by highlighting the "correct" way to look, which is hyperfeminine in a specific sort of way. (That look differs from culture to culture, obviously.) It's a uniform, which women must wear to prove that they are one of the group.

As such, it's also a form of control. I'm thinking also about the way women in the Christian Quiverfull movement were compelled to look -- with that long, over-permed hair and dowdy dresses; with that tiny high "girl" voice, and constant smile. Quiverfull women were not allowed to express any emotion except enraptured devotion. "Keeping sweet," they called it.

Trump women have to look and act a certain way also. It's a rigid gender performance, and it's there to ensure MAGA men that women exist to perform for them.

Here are more MAGA women. It's a little disturbing, and very creepy.

In a Desperate Bid to Boost his Approval Ratings

I don't think the guy with the guns at the Whitehouse Correspondents Dinner was staged, but I do think Trump's party is going to play it for all its worth. Hey, it got his approval ratings up last time, yeah?

That's not what I wanted to write about here.

Here, I want to talk about a different attempt to boost his ratings: an attempt to keep birth control out of the hands of Americans.

This is never going to happen, I was promised by endless people when Roe v Wade was overturned. Birth control is too popular! Yeah, well, so is abortion. Most people want it to be available; one in three women have had an abortion. I had one after my miscarriage, though when I say that people start shrieking that that is not "really" an abortion.

Yes, it fucking is. I needed it, too, because otherwise the fetal remains might have stayed in my uterus, causing sepsis, and damaging my future fertility.

How did the "conservatives" convince people abortion was evil?

(Except for their abortions, which like mine are not "really" abortions. I know people who are absolutely opposed to abortion until their sixteen year old needs one, and then it's "different," or until someone they know needs an abortion for medical reasons, and then that's not "really" an abortion.)

They pushed propaganda in their "conservative" Christian schools and their churches and their publications. They did this for 40 years. Even then, most people still want abortions to be legal.

Over the past two decades, these Christians have been spreading the lie that birth control is an abortifacient, that it "kills babies," and that a fertilized zygote is a baby. Facebook and TikTok and Instagram are filled with "health" advocates explaining how birth control damages women's health. 

Now Trump wants "to curb contraception."

His DHHS has released new guidelines, "prioritizing childbirth over contraception," and trying to convince people to use "natural family planning," instead of contraception. ('Natural family planning' is how we spell parenthood, by the way.)

Why? You know why.

The unwieldy political coalition that sent Trump back to the White House in 2024 is clamoring for action. For different reasons, an alliance of MAHA adherents, social conservatives and pronatalists are eager to go after birth control. With Trump sinking in the polls and his coalition fracturing, he may want to deliver for his core supporters. 

I'd say this was a terrible idea, but the past decade has proved to me that today's Trump supporters will literally do anything their ugly tin god tells them to do, and believe anything he tells them to believe. If it contradicts the reality, well, why should they believe in reality? That's what liberals do.

 

Bam!

I had the dog at the dog park this morning. There were two Australian shepherds there, about six months old, and he ran and ran with them. He was having a great time. Then he swerved to run past me, except he didn't run past, he clotheslined me and I slammed to the ground.

Let me tell you, falling when you're 66 is very different from falling when you're 26.

(I'm fine, except my ankle hurts a little.)

All three dogs came running back to make sure I was okay, sticking their noses in my ears and face. I said I was okay and they ran off again.

The culprit, all worn out

Weather Report

Weather page says it's going to rain for a week and then after that we'll get another short winter (lows in the 40s, highs in the 50s). My favorite weather!

Which is good, because next week is a nightmare. Nonstop medical appointments. FML.

My Kid Does Art

This is a picture of me driving around mourning my beloved 1989 Fayetteville: