no way out but through.

My sister asked if I was scared of giving birth. I am not, particularly. I don't expect it to be pleasant, in fact I am quite certain it will suck more than most things that have ever sucked before. But there's no way out but through at this point. My sister has given birth six times, so maybe you need the experience to have the dread.

I am also not scared of taking care of the baby. Not that I feel confident about it, but it does seem that there are complete morons out there who manage to keep a baby alive. I am not a complete moron, so my husband and I will probably muddle through with only light scarring. There will be mistakes, things that I feel bad about for an hour or a day or a week even, but then will tell as a reassuring story to some pregnant woman someday.

I am scared of other things. My continued ambivalence scares me. I thought I'd be more excited by now. I read a pregnancy forum that has been really helpful for me in that whatever symptom I'm having, other people are having it too. Plus, some women are having worse symptoms, plus relationship issues and dealing with controlling parents. A good story about a mother-in-law throwing a hissy fit about a baby shower really helps my pelvic pain. And there are threads where women fearfully ask if anyone else isn't excited "enough." So I'm not alone there. Other women, who already had babies, reassure the rest of us that they never felt particularly excited, but they're happy with their babies now.

That is reassuring. My lack of excitement makes me worry that I'm going to hate this motherhood thing. I asked a friend who already has a baby whether she bonded with her baby immediately upon birth. She did not really understand the question and reassured me about the keeping the baby alive part of it. That leads me to believe that new parents are too busy to worry about whether or not they actually like parenting. That's actually a bit comforting. Misery is worse when you have time to dwell on it. If I feel the cold grip of regret on my soul, I'll just start a load of laundry.

I have trouble picturing my life with a kid. It's like my due date is the horizon; after that, I can't see anything. I know my life will be drastically different, but I can't picture what it will look like. I try to insert a baby into it, but that just looks like my existing life with some random baby hanging out. I can't picture my baby. Maybe this would be easier if we knew the gender, then I could at least picture a baby with a bow on its head or something. I don't know how to be excited about spending 18 years with someone I don't even know.

Still, no way out but through.

mommy friend recommended.

Disclaimer: This is seriously some first world problem nonsense. I am very lucky to be able to afford nice things for my baby which will keep him/her safe and ease my life as a parent. Furthermore, I am lucky to have a choice in these things. Finally, I am the luckiest because other people buy me this stuff, so I don't have to consider cost as a huge factor in deciding which thing to use.

Baby stuff is a racket.

I sent an email to some mommy friends (because I have mommy friends), asking what sort of items I will need to care for a new baby. My frugal heart tried to get out of buying/registering for as much as possible. For example, I wanted to just skip the whole infant car seat. I mean, you have to buy another car seat when they get older, and some of those big kid car seats say they support newborns. It seemed like the whole infant car seat thing was a scam. Of course, pretty much no one recommended doing this, and everyone said you had to get the infant one. For safety reasons, and also so you can carry the sleeping baby from the car without waking it up.

Yeah, well, what if I want to wake my baby up? You know, to teach it about the inherent chaos that is life? What then?

FINE, I'll get an infant car seat. Also, did you know that you're not supposed to buy used car seats? It's because the seat might have been in an accident and therefore compromised. Also, they expire after six years. A scam, I tell ya.

So I started looking at car seats. And as bad as it was when I started adding up the cost of each of these items, when I started trying to figure out which one to buy was when my head started to spin. There are approximately 42 billion different options, and they each have very slight differences. These variations may seem minor, based on personal preferences even, but if you read enough product reviews, you'll find that it makes the difference between life and death. If you buy a car seat that doesn't have good LATCH support, then your baby will die or at least grow up to hate you. Then again, if you buy one without adequate belt connections, then your baby will become maimed and never be able to form meaningful relationships. Either way, most car seats are not installed properly, and it's really a wonder anyone survives the ride home from the hospital.

I was stressing out about all this stuff, venting to my husband first about the expense and then about the choices. After describing various seemingly trivial options in car seats to him, he smiled and said, "See? You're starting to get into this."

I glared at him. "No, but someone has to make this decision, and you'd quit after five minutes." That is true, but I can't even tell whether that might be a better strategy. Go to Amazon and pick the best reviews or just ask a mommy friend. You'd probably end up feeling like you did okay, you'd likely never know if other versions were better, and there is no way you'd tie your child's future emotional instability to a poor car seat choice.

I finally picked a car seat. I was oddly reassured to see a picture of the Duke of Cambridge carrying the baby prince in the same model. Yup, we went with this one because my royal mommy friend recommended it.

And repeat, with each item. We received as gifts two baby carriers. One of them seemed nicer, as it supported a front-facing position, because who doesn't like to see babies bobbing on their dad's chest, smiling at the world? As it turns out, front-facing has a danger of over-stimulation, because babies just aren't ready for the world. Also, the way certain carriers support the baby possibly leads to hip dysplasia. Hip dysplasia. I thought that was just something dogs got from being inbred. I yearn for the days before internet reviews, where you just asked your mommy friends what they had and liked and then you bought it and babies had hip dysplasia and liked it. Babies were tougher then.

Last night, when I was explaining the carrier dilemma to Josh, he began to see the insanity that is deciding on anything, ever. He was inclined to choose one model because someone who is more his friend gave it to us, as opposed to the one given to us by someone who is more my friend. But then he found out about the hip thing, and how one was designed with input from baby hip specialist-type people. Whole worlds of frightening possibilities opened up to him with the realization that there are people who study baby hips. Just when you think you can trust your mommy friends, you find out they're trying to give your kid hip dysplasia.

january 2015 books.

Genesis: Memory of Fire, Volume 1
Eduardo Galeano
A brief note to say that Galeano is Uruguayan! I'm not sure that I've ever read anything by a Uruguayan author before. I should get a map and put pins in it.

So, I'm not sure what you would call this book. It's non-fiction, with short chapters detailing events that happened during the discovery and colonization of the New World, with particular focus on Latin and South America. There are footnotes for each chapter that lead to the original sources. Galeano retells these events in his own voice. There are threads running through, like there might be several chapters about the life of an individual, but those chapters are intermixed with other chapters that occurred at the same time. So the narrative is about the whole period, rather than any particular set of characters.

The first section is full of creation myths from various peoples across North and South America. These varied from creation of the Sun to some just-so stories about how animals got certain characteristics. My favorite of these was when a meeting of the animals was interrupted by the sunrise, and the bear, leaving in a hurry, put his moccasins on the wrong feet, and that's why the bear walks that way. There were even a couple about how the men came to be in charge. One story said the women used to be in charge, but then the men killed all the women and then raised the now-motherless children to believe that men were supposed to be in charge. That is not as hilarious.

And then the Europeans came. The stories then were full of blood and betrayal and gold.

I did learn about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Poor Sor Juana. She was apparently brilliant, but learning was forbidden for females at the time, so she was self-taught. She ended up joining a convent as an alternative to marriage (pretty much the only choice for her). She joined a sect that was more lenient about women studying, but she was still censured by the church for "waywardness." Much of her written work ended up being destroyed by church officials. Just think what she might have done had she been allowed, even encouraged to use her mind.

Also, I learned that the Spanish king in charge of much of the westward expansion, Charles II, was disabled physically, intellectually, and emotionally, from all the inbreeding. Because he was completely incompetant, the fate of Spain, new and old, was left to his advisors, court, and foreign influence. I know, it's kinda dumb to rail against the monarchy now, but dang, that was screwed up.

This book is the first of a trilogy, and thus covered only up to 1800. I enjoyed it, but found all the names and places a bit confusing. I think that's okay, as the point was more to weave an overall picture, rather than teach names and dates. It was frequently infuriating. I might pick up the other two books if I found them, as I think more recent history would appeal to me more.

Crabwalk
Günter Grass
I came to a realization while reading this book, and I'm going to cop to it, though it makes me look kinda stupid. I knew that the Nazis were also called the Nationalist Socialist party, and I got that they were all about Germany and Germanic people (the "nationalist" part). But I guess I never really thought about the socialist part. It kinda gets lost in the shuffle, what with the genocide and all.

The story centers around the sinking of a ship, the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, which was originally commissioned as part of the Strength Through Joy program. This was a government leisure program, meant to boost tourism and make nice things like cruise trips available to everyone, regardless of social status. The characters in the book take a cruise on the Wihlem Gustloff, and they keep remarking about the concept of a classless ship. So everyone gets to eat the same food and see the same sights and attend the same shows. A classless ship! It sounds nice, doesn't it? Socialism always sounds so nice.

Then the war came, and the Wilhelm Gustloff was turned into a navy vessel, then a hospital ship and floating barracks. Finally, it was used to evacuate troops and civilians to escape the advancing Red Army. During one of those transports, it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Over 9,000 people died, which is the largest death toll from the sinking of a single ship (in comparison, about 1500 people died when the Titanic sank).

The action of the novel itself takes place 50 years after the sinking of the ship and the end of the war. The narrator is a German who was born right as the ship was sinking - his mother had been rescued and gave birth on one of the rescue ships. She has been very insistent all his life that he needs to write about the ship, as the news of it was suppressed by both the Germans and the Soviets. Since he has not done so, she turns to his estranged son, who starts up a website about it. The topic, because the ship was named after a Nazi martyr and because it was suppressed tragedy, attracts a Neo-Nazi following which is keen to point out how the Germans suffered (question: are Neo-Nazis socialist, or is it really about the anti-semitism with those guys?).

My understanding is that Grass thinks that the Germans have not properly dealt with their Nazi past. How can you say that, Günter? Everybody knows that the Germans have bent over backwards to show that they are ashamed and sorry over what went down. His point seems to be that everyone has forgotten the socialist aspect of it - that the masses were suffering, which is when Socialism sounds the nicest of all. By being silent about how the Nazis came to power, how nice Socialism sounded at the time, the only voices on the topic are the extremists.

I don't feel so bad about not realizing the Nazis were socialists now.

Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Supposedly, this is the greatest novel ever written. It was okay?

The characters were certainly well-written. As people, they were familiar, and their actions in the story all seemed inevitable, like that is just what they would do. By the end, that was frustrating. While I can see why Anna completely lost it, it is never pleasant to see anyone acting out that way.

I was never particularly compelled by Anna, actually. Half the book is about another person in her extended social circle, Constantin Levin. I much preferred him and his story arc. There are beautiful scenes with his dying brother and the birth of his son, and he even has a happy ending. I'm not really sure how to fit the stories of the two main characters together. They are related because they deal with a lot of the same people, but I'm not sure why it wouldn't work as well as two books. And then I could skip the book about the sad lady who has an affair and goes nuts and just read about the hard-working farmer guy who finds love and faith.

There is a lot of historical context in the book, and so there was a great deal of discussion about land policy, the peasant class, and education reform. I find that I have a hard time with books where smart people sit around and have a discussion about a topic, particularly when I don't know anything about that topic. I suppose if I were a real scholar, I could have easily educated myself on the topic of the role of the peasant in Russian society. I did not do that. Instead I just got frustrated during those parts. Apparently, these sections were Tolstoy's way of holding forth on topics of his day. While it does serve to paint a very broad picture of Russia at that time, I found it distracting and taxing.

So yeah. I guess I don't get it. I hate when that happens.

Burger's Daughter
Nadine Gordimer
This novel centers around Rosa Burger, a young South African woman whose parents were white people in the Communist anti-apartheid movement. She is now orphaned and is unsure of what to do with her life. Since childhood, she was raised to see injustice and to fight it. She was even sent to sneak messages and papers into jail or to other revolutionaries.

But now she is on her own. She doesn't seem to think that the cause will do any good. Her parents' old comrades try to get her to continue in the work. She mostly wants to leave the country. She is listless and uninvolved with her life and can't seem to build any sort of intimacy with anyone.

It's interesting to think about, particularly with a brand new human forming in my tummy. Our kid will be brought up to view the world a certain way, because we view the world a certain way. And they may eventually accept, modify, or rebel completely against that view. Obviously, we think our perspective is right, and we want our child to go ahead and have this perspective, without having to go through all the hard work of eliminating the perspectives we eliminated to get here. But that doesn't always work. Actually, does it ever work?

In the end, Rosa is arrested and sent to jail without having done anything. Maybe the lesson is that you can't escape your parents. So there, kid.

The Algiers Motel Incident
John Hersey
Oy.

Back in the summer of 1967, there were some riots in Detroit, started by the raid of an illegal bar (called a blind pig). On the fourth day of the riot, someone called in a report of a sniper at the Algiers Motel (no sniper was ever found, it seems the report was based on someone hearing gunfire and then seeing someone else hit the dirt for cover). Police and National Guardsmen stormed the motel, leaving three young black men dead and several other people badly beaten, including two women who were stripped nearly naked.

Hersey goes to Detroit and interviews anybody he can find that had anything to do with the case. In writing up reports about the incident, two of the cops stated that they shot and killed two of the young men. However, these reports were thrown out of court as inadmissable, as the cops had not been informed that anything they stated might be used against them. Witness testimony was often confused and conflicting, due to the events being confused and often terrifying, and in the end, no one went to jail.

There is a particularly interesting passage where one of the cops talks about working vice, mostly busting prostitutes. He wonders whether his job is interfering with his ability to have a close relationship with a woman. This is wonderfully self-aware of the guy, though it's not entirely clear if he thinks of his wariness of women as justified or not. Hersey asks whether he thinks it's influencing him to see women as more prone to evil, and he responds, "Who offered who the apple?" So working in a poverty-stricken, high-crime, black community might also give one the idea that black people are all criminals. That's a completely understandable and very human reaction. But the opinion is not based on a representative sample of either black people or criminals. It is understandable, but not justified.

On the other hand, many members of the black community do not have much respect for law enforcement. They are often treated like criminals, whether or not they've done anything. They don't feel the law respects them, so why should they respect it? During the trial, at least one of the witnesses was just plain uncooperative, as if he didn't think it mattered one way or the other what he said, as the outcome was pre-determined. It is hard to read his testimony and not want to yell at him, but you also wonder whether it would've made any difference had he played it straight.

It was certainly a very timely book to read, what with recent events in Ferguson and Staten Island. I'd like to think that the situation has improved, but I can't help but think that under similar riot conditions today, kids would still die and be beaten and no one would ever be punished for it.

saturday soup.

On Sundays after church, Josh wants soup. Our church is across the street from Food Lion, so we used to just stop on the way home and pick up some Campbell's for lunch. I quickly got tired of this ritual, because as it turns out, canned soup is not very good. Has no one else has noticed? Also, we usually have perfectly good homemade leftovers at home. Why are we spending money on bad food when we have free, good food at home? That sounds like something my mother would've said to me twenty or so years ago, and she had a point.

The solution was for me to start making soup on Saturday night. Then the free, good leftovers would be soup, which was just what my sweet man wanted. Sometimes, they were even better Sunday afternoon, after the flavors had had a night to mingle and marry.

So now we go sailing on past the Food Lion, no need to stop and get oddly-metallic tasting soup filled with meat-like lumps. Except last Friday, I got a text in the middle of the day which pathetically said only "soup?" I had to inform him that there was no soup, there would be soup tomorrow, but not today because he already ate it all. However, I have yet another solution. Each week, I will take a couple of portions out of the soup pot and freeze them, such that my poor, darling husband need not suffer from a soup emergency.

Anyway, I have a lot of soup recipes.

Today, I'm sharing my chicken noodle soup recipe. It starts with "throw a chicken into a pot." I follow the recipe as-is, though I leave out the mushrooms because they are gross. It is a Paula Deen recipe, so it is a bit decadent. No butter, but there is parmesan cheese and heavy cream. But it makes a huge pot of soup, so I like to think that the unhealthy elements are only a small part of the whole.

Note that the recipe calls for a 2.5 - 3 lb chicken. Well, this must've been in the days before chicken growth hormone, because even the smallest birds at the grocery store are 5 pounds. So as a bonus, I am left with a couple of cups of already-cooked chicken meat that I can throw into some other recipe or even freeze and save for later use.

This soup tastes like someone loves you. Even though I make the soup, when I eat it, I feel loved. I'm pretty sure it's the fact that you're making homemade stock when you think you're just making soup. Homemade stock tastes like love, which is why the pioneers had much higher self-esteem (I made that up).

Make some for someone you love today (including yourself!): The Lady's Chicken Noodle Soup

Oh, and I have one more thing to say about soup. Once, when I was a kid, we were eating chicken noodle soup at the dinner table, and my dad sneezed a whole mouthful of it all over my face. It was truly spectacular and disgusting. That event finally taught a man in his 60s that he needs to turn away or cover his mouth when he sneezes, at least at the dinner table. Every time he sneezed at the table after that - he must use a lot of pepper - he would turn away, and then give me a Look.

romanian spy.

Last Sunday after church, there was a note stuck on our door when we got home. It was vague and odd.

"Does Sandra live here? If so, I have something that belongs to you."

Followed by an unfamiliar name and phone number.

I considered my options. The only thing that I had lost recently that would lead someone to my front door was my wallet, which I lost back in November at the Charlotte airport. It seemed unlikely that someone had found it and wanted to return it two months later and 165 miles away. Then again, I couldn't figure out what kind of scam someone could be running here. Had the note been composed of cut-out newspaper letters and made some demands, that would be different. Also, it seemed like a proper ransom note would at least tell me what they had, to make sure that I understood the urgency of the situation. It could be blackmail, like maybe they had evidence of my shady dealings. But I don't have any shady dealings. Possibly they were casing the joint? Well, I don't want to spread misinformation about the viciousness of pitbulls, but I really haven't worried about the safety of my home since I got one.

So I called the guy. No answer, and his voicemail was full. A minute later, he texted me to say that he'd call me back after his meeting. Alright, then. In the meantime, I googled the guy's name. I found a dude that used to live in Florida but now was in Charlotte. He used to be in TV, but now seemed to be in some kind of vague get-rich-by-doing-something-unstated business. Now my thought was that he was going to try and sell me something.

Enter my husband. Have I ever told you about his imagination? It's vivid. Our unknown visitor was in some kind of group of television professionals named TVR. As far as I could tell, it was a group specifically associated with the social media platform. But Josh googled it and came up with the Romanian state television. Ergo, this man was a Romanian spy. He wouldn't say why the Romanian government would be interested in me, but he felt that any association with a former Soviet satellite country was very fishy.

The Cold War was very formative on my husband.

Josh complains that I make him sound like an idiot on my blog. I am guilty of that, usually because making someone else sound like an idiot is funny. But he's not. He's brilliant. His curiosity is insatiable, and so he knows a lot about a lot of different subjects because he happened to have a question one day and then spent hours reading everything about it. He sees patterns and connections that I would never notice. I have a pretty high opinion of my own intelligence, and we are evenly matched when we debate (except for all that knowledge, he just has so much). But it's like he's seeing whole different layers of the world than I am.

It's just that sometimes those layers aren't really there, in a strictly objective sense. I think sometimes he looks at reality and then at the magical world painted inside his head, and I guess he concludes that the latter is more interesting and thus probably what's really going on. And so, I'm sorry, my sweet beloved man, but there is no way to say that you thought that guy was a Romanian spy without making you sound a little off.

Obviously, I find this trait of his frustrating and occasionally maddening, like when he's sternly telling me that I shouldn't have called that guy because something-something-Romania. There are times when I wonder if this is going to be something that gets worse with age, and I'm going to be sitting at the nursing home, too old and tired to argue anymore. And there are still other times when I grimly realize that I have married my own father, who also sees plots where the general chaos of the world and incompetance of the human race will do.

Like I said, a wonderful and brilliant man. His imagination is magical, and I love him for it. I am happily passing on his shimmering, multi-colored genes. It's just hard that the very things you adore about a person in some cases are the things that make you want to throttle them in others.

I have never been attracted to logical men. The computer science department was lousy with single men, but they just weren't interesting to me. The world was the world, and that was that. They had no imagination. Boooo-ring. Obviously, I'm into crazy painted brains. And Josh's dating history is a series of sensible women. Aside from the attraction, we're just good for each other. I assist him in navigating the world as it exists, and he keeps me from being mired in technicalities. I can be excruciatingly pedantic. I probably used to call it being precise (and RIGHT!), but really it's just being a jerk.

So he's crazy, and I'm a jerk. And somehow it turns out that crazy and jerk attract each other and help one another become a little less crazy and a bit less of a jerk.

ANYWAY. The note guy came by later and gave me my wallet. It had everything in it, all the cash, cards, gift cards, and even my used book store credit. Romanians are A-OK in my book.

how are you feeling?

When you are pregnant, people ask how you are feeling. Whereas normally, small talk would start with "How are you?," growing a baby means that suddenly everyone asks, "How are you feeling?" with a lot of emphasis poured into that last word. I was surprised when this started happening, and even more amazed to realize how universal it is. Everyone wants to know how I am feeling.

Sometimes, I pretend to not know what they are asking. Pleasant obliviousness is my favorite form of passive aggressive behavior. I brightly say, "Fine! How are you?" Most times they respond and we have a normal conversation. Sometimes they blink in confusion, say they are fine, then ask again about me, being more explicit that they want baby information.

Other times, I tell them how I am feeling. Usually, it's when I feel crappy. But no one likes this either. Just like when someone asks how you are, you're supposed to just say something short and generally positive, no one likes to hear a pregnant lady complain. They don't want to hear about nausea or back pain, much less some of the more, ahem, intimate symptoms of pregnancy.

Recently, I have hit upon the perfect answer. I just say I feel pregnant, with a touch of weariness. Pregnancy is a whole-body condition. Countless times in the last six months, I've googled a symptom, and the second auto-suggestion is always the symptom followed by the word "pregnancy." And then when I research further, the answer is always hormones. I've started to get used to this, but my sweet husband always wants to diagnose me with something else.

Gastrointestinal issues, including heartburn and any-time-of-day sickness, are caused by progesterone. See, my organs have got to move around a bit, so the hormones make them a bit more malleable. I haven't had problems with any of that for a few months, but I hear it can come back. I honestly don't even know where my stomach is at this point, as my innards are all rearranged. I've also had a stuffy nose for months, which is apparently estrogen's fault.

And the itching. I've had dry skin issues during the winter since I was a teenager, but this is a whole new level. It has to do with my skin stretching. So not only do I writhe around like a bear against a tree, I get to imagine that my scratch marks will eventually turn to stretch marks. I make Josh slather me up with moisturizer every night. The lotion I bought didn't seem to be helping, so we started using the Bag Balm we already had in the house, which was made to be used on cow udders. It helps, but I smell like bovine medicine.

And then there relaxin, which is a hormone and not some kind of OTC pain relief. See, normally, the bones in the pelvis are stable and all tightly connected. But at some point, I'm going to try and push a person through there, so relaxin loosens up my joints so they can open up to allow passage of a big-headed baby. I'm sure I'll appreciate the relaxin then, but for now, it sucks. It makes my crotch bones hurt, which is basically a new kind of pain for me. There are lots of positions that I can no longer be in without pain. The worst is trying to sleep. Sleeping on my stomach is right out, and sleeping on my back means the baby is cutting off blood vessels that bring blood...to the baby (way to go, Baby). But if I turn on my side, I have to have a pillow between my legs, because of the crotch bone pain. A night's rest is now waking up every couple of hours to roll over (increasingly difficult) while keeping the pillow. Also, I may have to blow my nose and apply some chapstick. Sometimes I go back to sleep, and sometimes I stay awake awhile and panic about the approaching end of my life as I know it.

Also, there is something in my body poking me. Sometimes it's a quick jab, like lunch returning on you. Other times, it is a punch to the bladder. Lately, it's been more like a push. It's uncomfortable, so I push back on the little foot or knee or whatever, and it will retreat. I feel a little guilty when I do this, because clearly someone is just running out of room in there, but seriously kid, that feels really weird. It's uncomfortable, but it does bring it home that there is an actual tiny person in there with actual tiny body parts. I can't compare this to getting some bad Taco Bell, unless you've ever had a gordita try to escape through your abdominal wall.

So that is how I am feeling. You didn't really want to know, did you?

birth center.

The sign directed us downstairs to the first floor. As we waited for the elevator, another young couple came up behind us, then another. I looked at the other ladies and smiled to myself. As we all got into the elevator, one of the other men said, "I reckon we're all going to the same place." We laughed. Three visibly pregnant women and their men.

We were told to schedule a tour of the birth center at our very first appointment. We finally got around to it this week. Judging by the conditions of the other women, we weren't the only ones to wait. I came late, but prepared. Earlier that day, I'd done some research on what questions to ask at a hospital tour. I'd found lots of lists prepared by what I can only assume are the super-prepared, super-involved type. These sorts of questions varied from basic (Where do we park?) to the possibly-confrontational, patient advocate type (Can we refuse an IV?). Josh, confused by my calling it a "birth center," only wanted to know how far it was from the hospital. It's in the hospital.

We arrived at Classroom I, at the far end of the main dining hall. We were given a folder full of materials and directed inside, where more pregnant ladies and their companions waited. It was a diverse crowd; everybody has babies. It was nice being there with them all, with our individual lives and backgrounds, yet sharing these same feelings of shy nervousness and excitement.

The nurse at the front went through a powerpoint presentation, referencing various forms in our packets. As the questions on my sheet were answered, I checked them off. I'd been concerned by reading the question lists, which gave the impression that giving birth is basically like being on an assembly line - go here, put this on, take this, don't do that, wear this, here's your baby, go home. But a lot of the things that the websites implied that we would have to demand with angry fists were standard practice here, or at least a common enough request that it's stated up front in the orientation. They seemed to be about providing us with options rather than directions.

Next, we split up into two groups to go on a tour of the center itself. The rooms were all private and spacious. The decor was a bit dated, but everything looked clean and reasonably comfortable (the beds looked good, the recliner for the husband not so much). This part of the tour was conducted by a different nurse, one with a thick Southern accent who obviously loved babies. She mentioned that they'd had a lot of especially cute babies there recently. The ward was mostly empty, but behind a door bedecked with a blue ribbon came a wail.

By the end of the tour, all my questions had been answered. I'm not particularly looking forward to giving birth, but I feel pretty good about doing it there.

december 2014 books.

The Sot-weed Factor
John Barth
The back cover uses the word "Rabelasian," and I groaned when I saw it. I got about one-fifth into Rebelais before the Rabelasianness just got to me. So much peeing and farting and eating and having sex. However, I found this to be acceptably Rabelasian. There was indeed a lot of bodily functions, and the plot turned on genitalia, but it was not so much that I couldn't finish it. There was also a lot of philosophy, wordplay, politics, and secret identities. There was even character development. Our protagonist starts off a directionless poet. He is forced to come to Maryland to take over his father's farm, but he gets himself commissioned as the Poet Laureate of Maryland, even though he hasn't actually written any poems. He just emotes a lot. He's a selfish, bumbling nitwit who composes odes to great Maryland before he ever gets there. Then he has a lot of terrible adventures, because colonial life is freaking rough. He writes an actual poem (not flattering to Maryland) and becomes a man (in every sense, because Rabelais).

This was not intentional, but this book was a good choice to read so soon after the book about the Pilgrims. Set in the late 17th century, John Smith's secret journal was a plot device, so the language and the setting and the colonial politics were all familiar. I can't imagine the amount of research that went into this, just to write using that sort of language.

The style is verbose and twisting. The main characters are going around having adventures, but there are lots and lots of tangential stories. I enjoy this style, though it was confusing in this case because a few of the characters kept popping up disguised as other characters. It really paid off in the end, though, when the main story came together with all the little side stories. It was all very neatly done. So neatly, in fact, that the protagonist remarks that "Fate is a shameless playwright." Heh.

I wrote down a quote to give an example of how filthy and yet literary this book is: "...whose astrolabe had already taken the alnicanter of her constellation." I don't even know what some of those words are, but I understood that it was about a man taking a lady's virginity. I looked up "alnicanter" and discovered that it was an archaic spelling of almucantar. The third search result was an excerpt from John Smith's actual writings. See? That's a lot of research for a dirty joke.

The Awakening
Kate Chopin
An upper class wife and mother realizes that she is unhappy in this life, stops doing the things expected of her role, takes a lover, dies sad.

Edna sort of looks around at her life and isn't all that sure how she got there or if it's what she wants. This book was written over 100 years ago, and this still happens. When I was growing up, life seemed like a set of checkmarks. Since I was a modern woman, these checkmarks included things like college and a job (though not necessarily a career), and then marriage and children. I like lists, and I like checking things off, so it didn't occur to me that I hadn't really made the list in the first place.

When I was about to graduate from college, I tried to bring up the subject of marriage to my long-term boyfriend. He was pretty uninterested in that, to the point where we were not able to even have a conversation about it. The subject itself became taboo. I felt pretty frustrated and thwarted by this, because what else were we supposed to do? That was clearly the next check. Of course, he was very right not to want to get married, because our relationship was pretty busted at that point, as you might have figured from us not being able to even talk about our future together.

After we broke up, I realized that I had this idea that there was exactly one path to a happy and fulfilled life. I still thought that I probably wanted to get married and have kids someday, but those options were not open right now, so I would need to figure something else out.

So Edna has this same sort of realization, except she has already gotten married and had children. It being the time that it is, though, she definitely did not have many other options. I had lots of options, I just didn't really consider them. Edna realizes that she does not love her husband, and while she loves her children, she doesn't seem all that attached to them. Being the wife of a rich man, they have a nanny that seems to do most of the motherly type things.

Of course, there was much outrage at the book and at the idea that women might have desires and ambitions that were not fulfilled by motherhood. At best, reviews said that it was beautifully written but immoral. The book is set in Louisiana, where women were still legal property at the time, so you can see how the establishment might have been threatened by the idea of the property getting ideas. Chopin's career collapsed after publication, and she herself died not long after. Her work was basically forgotten until it was rediscovered in the 1960s.

I heard someone say once that art should be "uplifting." I am not sure what an uplifting version of this story would be. Once you figure out that you're miserable, where do you go? The best I can get to is acceptance, which is also not uplifting and smacks of condescension. Chopin is not lifting Edna up to be idolized, but rather to put it out there that women want to and could do other things. Maybe not all women should be mothers. An etiquette book of the time says that "if she has the true mother-heart the companionship of her children will be the society which she will prefer above that of all others." And if she doesn't? That possibility doesn't seem to be considered.

I think non-uplifting art is important. It's important that other women who might recognize themselves in Edna be told that they are not alone or not real women. They might even be able to make real changes in the world. And it's important that men are able to see it from the other side. Art is not just to uplift, it is to enable one to empathize.

Tempest-Tost
Robertson Davies
This was my second novel of Davies, which I did not enjoy as much as his other one. He seems to like to take little groups of people who are thrown together in small cultures. In this case, it was a community theatre troup putting on a Shakespeare play. I have some experience in local theatre, and the characters and little dramas in this story are bang-on. There are the scandalous affairs, those pining in the wings, the power plays, and of course, the show.

Not much to say. It was a fun read.

A Fan's Notes
Frederick Exley
Sigh.

So, there is a genre of books that I call Sad Man books. I can read them, I think I understand them, but I can never really get on board with them. Sad Men often have fraught relationships with their fathers. They like women, but do not understand them or even necessarily see them as people to be understood. They drink a lot, and they are very lonely. Josh says that Sad Men think their solitude is part of being a man. A man does not need other people, except for Jack Daniels.

Exley is a Sad Man. He is a drunk and is possibly suffering from mental illness. He has several stints in a mental institution, but his only goal while there is to get out, and he doesn't say whether he thinks anything is wrong with him. He lives in the shadow of his father, who was a high school football star before becoming an upstanding family man and hero of the community and then dying young. Exley spends the whole book coming to the terms that he will never be a hero, like Frank Gifford, or even his dad. Why he can't become a pillar of the community is unsaid, though maybe it has to do with his likely depression.

Exley writes very well. He paints vivid pictures of the kinds of interesting characters you meet as a drunk. It's funny and poignant and sad. But a few chapters in, he tells about his years of seduction. By seduction, he sometimes means rape. He is having a lot of sex with women he doesn't care about, sometimes against their will, and then he wonders why it doesn't make him happy. And that's the momentous realization he gets out of it - it doesn't make him happy. At no point does it occur to him to consider how anyone else who was involved might feel about it. Sad Men are self-absorbed.

I didn't get the impression that he thought of what he was doing as rape, possibly because that would mean looking at it from the woman's perspective. He seems to believe that the women gave consent by coming to his apartment, and the fact that they were crying and saying "no no no" later doesn't matter. I don't think he would be alone in those assumptions, particularly for his time (50s and 60s). Anyway, he lost me at that point. I understand that this is a person that exists in the world, and as a fellow human being, I owe him my empathy and compassion. We need people who are adept with words to put these experiences out there, as eloquently as possible. And the fact that there seem to be several writers like this out there indicates that he's not alone. I still believe in art as a path to empathy.

But I did not enjoy his company.

november 2014 books.

Hey, we're almost caught up here!

The Double
Jose Saramago
A depressed history teacher watches a movie and sees one of the actors is an exact duplicate of him. He becomes obsessed, tracking down the actor by watching other movies (it's a bit part, so the role is not credited directly) from the same company. By cross-referencing movies, he's able to figure out the actor's name, though he finds it's only a screen name and then he has to track down the real name. Finally, he contacts the actor directly to tell him that he, a stranger, is apparently his exact double.

It's such a thin premise on first glance. The whole time he is seeking out the actor, I'm yelling at him in my head. Dude, just let it go and mind your own business. What difference does it make that this guy exists? But I can see how it would bug someone, particularly someone who didn't have much else going on in his life at the moment. Even he doesn't really know where he's going or what he will do once he finds the actor, he just feels the compulsion to follow the trail.

It's a strange sort of thriller, and the ending has a great twist. I enjoyed it, though it did not strike me nearly as much as another work of Saramago's, Blindness.

The News From Paraguay
Lily Tuck
This was historical fiction, based on the lives of President Francisco Lopez and his long-term mistress. This guy apparently ruined Paraguay by starting a war he couldn't win or pay for. Spoiler alert, he dies in the mud. After getting 60% of the population killed and devasting the economy, of course.

You know, this book won a National Book Award, but the Amazon reviews are pretty mixed. I'd have to agree. It didn't really stick to me, one way or the other. It's clearly about the mistress, and I think I was supposed to feel...something about her involvement with the politics of killing a lot of people for the sake of vanity. But it wasn't really clear what her involvement was. She has children and affairs and sometimes she sit there while the President rants about politics to her. She did not seem to have any actual power. I would've preferred an alternate history where she kills the guy before he breaks Paraguay.

The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity
Mark Vonnegut
I read this on the way back from San Francisco. It's all about hippies, so it was entirely appropriate. These hippies do not live on the street, but instead take to the woods to build a commune. They buy some land in British Columbia, work all day at building a house and growing/catching food and try to make a real go of the simpler life.

The only problem is that the author comes down with a bad case of schizophrenia. His friends try to contain and help him for a while, but at some point they have to put him in an institution for his safety and their sanity. I fortunately have had very little experience with schizophrenia, but it sounds pretty terrible. He talks about receiving information, but it comes in so fast (and from where, exactly?) that his brain cannot process it. At least some of it is outright untrue, though much of it feels like revelation. It sounds sorta poetic and magical, except for the not eating or sleeping and the suicide attempts. Maybe he is having revelations, but a body cannot function that way.

What struck me was the stigma about mental illness within his group. When I think about a mental illness stigma, I think about people saying that the mentally ill just need to get over it, that we all go through crap and those people just want attention or are too weak to suck it up and get on with living. That's essentially saying that mental illness itself does not exist. These hippies also believed mental illness did not exist, but for different reasons. They thought that the mentally ill were just super oppressed. A quote he uses frequently is that "schizophrenia is an appropriate reaction to an insane world." Basically, this person is not sick, the world is.

Vonnegut himself has this view, and has a really hard time resolving it with his own experience. In fact, he is terribly disappointed to find out that it's about brain chemistry, not oppression and society. It makes him feel like a bad hippie. He wants this poetic condition to have a poetic cure. But in the end, he has to admit that treating it as a brain chemistry problem seems to work.

I think we can all agree that the world is quite sick, but I'm pretty sure some people have something in their brains that does not let them function. The more I read or listen to accounts of mental illness, the more I realize that I don't know anything, and the best course is to just be compassionate and also thankful that I haven't had to deal with it.

The author is the son of American author Kurt Vonnegut. That's the first thing that is mentioned in the author bio in the book, and I felt kinda bad for the guy about it. That being said, I think it's the very reason I picked up the book in the first place.

Saints and Strangers: Being the Lives of the Pilgrim Fathers and Their Families, with Their Friends and Foes, and an Account of the Posthumous ... and the Strange Pilgrimages of Plymouth Rock
George F. Willison
I picked this up right before Thanksgiving - how appropriate! I don't guess I had any strong ideas about the Pilgrims, other than a vague notion they wore buckles on their hats and that colonizing a new world sucks. As it turns out, the whole black clothes with buckles thing was the Puritans, who were farther north. The Pilgrims were also not hardcore believers in religious freedom. They were in disagreement with the Anglican church about a lot of things, and they resented the way that the state was able to enforce religious belief. So they went off, first to the Netherlands, and then to the New World, to practice their religion the way they wanted to. Anyone else who lived with them was also forced to practice religion that way. So their disagreement was not in the intermingling of church and state, but that it was the wrong church.

If you are interested in a actual pioneer of religious freedom, check out the founder of Rhode Island, Roger Willams.

Not all of the Pilgrims were even religious types. Many of them had just signed onto the voyage to make their fortunes. In fact, the only Pilgrim most people could name, Myles Standish, was among these. And once they all got to the New World, there was a lot of politics and backstabbing and a bit of unnecessary killing of natives. You know, regular human stuff.

What was interesting to me was how much the reality differs from the myth. Our popular notion of the Pilgrims comes from a poem that a lady in England wrote after reading an article about some journals that had been rediscovered. She did not read the journals, nor did the article she read have very much information about the settlement and its inhabitants. I don't know if you know any poets, but it really does not take much for their minds to just take off, filling in the holes with imaginative details. In fact, they don't even need holes to make stuff up. Sometimes they just make something sound better. That's not this lady's fault. If you'd asked her, she would've told you that she was a poet, not a historian, you silly goose. And that's how legends and myths are born, with a bit of fact and a smattering of poetry.

Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
I read The Handmaid's Tale not too long ago, and we talked about speculative fiction. It's sorta like sci-fi in that the world described does not exist, but while science fiction is often talking about other worlds entirely, speculative fiction deals with what could happen, if certain human tendencies were taken to their extremes. The Handmaid's Tale was about a society of extreme oppression of women. This one deals with genetic modifications.

We follow the thoughts and actions of Snowman, who appears to be the last man on earth. There are other "people," called the Children of Crake, but they are clearly not like people we would recognize, in either their physical form or their society. In the course of Snowman's narrative about his days, where he is barely surviving, he relives his past and just how the human race came to this. Hint: it was our own dang fault.

While the world that Snowman describes is completely unrecognizable from ours (bizarre weather, no civilization, weird critters), his flashbacks sound sorta familiar. It's like our world, except certain things are amplified. Enormous resources are put into science and technology, while the arts founder. The rich and educated are kept in sterile compounds associated with their science-based jobs or institutions of learning, where there is abundant food and recreation. The rest of humanity lives in dirty, crime-ridden cities. Porn is everywhere. Food is largely synthetic; even chicken nuggets are grown on weird nugget trees. Everything sounds just a little bit familiar.

And then it all goes bad. There's a plague, the genetically modified creatures get out, all those neatly sealed barriers between the rich and the poor break down.

While this was interesting, I did not enjoy it as much as The Handmaid's Tale. I was not particularly attached to the characters. However, I did like the ending, when the Children of Crake, which were genetically designed to not be the screw-ups that we regular humans are, start making art. Their creator, Crake, implied that if that happened, they were doomed. And maybe they are, but after all, they were designed by a screw-up.

nesting.

I've been cleaning out the house. They call this "nesting," which makes it sound sweet and romantic, like a mama cat dragging dish towels to the hidey hole under the stairs. I guess I'm doing all the behaviors that one would call nesting, but it doesn't feel like motherly hormones. It feels like panic, like holy crap, we are not ready for this life upheaval mentally, emotionally, or financially, but at least I can get rid of some of this junk we have lying around. It's sorta like when you have a big paper due, and suddenly cleaning your room is the most important thing.

Pregnancy symptoms in general have not been what I'd hoped. While I would've preferred to have what I imagined were serene nesting instincts, at least stuff is getting done. We built a gate for our fence, the siding is being patched, and someone came to prune our trees. Our Goodwill pile is huge.

The room that we are turning into a nursery was previously our junk room. We always seem to have a junk room, or as a visiting friend once called it, Grandma's Room. We are not full-blown hoarders, but we are definitely accumulators.

A lot of what we have is aspirational or conservation clutter. So much stuff devoted to Someday. This clock is so cool, I will fix it. This fabric is really nice, I will make something out of it. This stationery is lovely, I will write poignant letters on it. This book is important, I will read it and be wise.

My to-read pile is in the nursery. By pile, I mean three bookshelves. I have made huge strides, as the last one used to be two deep. But even so, it makes me sad to look at them all and think that there are some that I will never ever get to. I've been reading hard, even to the detriment to my comprehension sometimes. I post my summaries, you can vouch for me - I read a lot! But it's just not enough.

As we age, our possibilities vanish. At age 7, there still existed a possible future for me as an astronaut. But at some point, that future disappeared because I chose a different one. We take a path to the exclusion of others we might have gone down. This is unavoidable. Some paths disappear just by our aging, and not picking a path is still picking one.

My husband and I have chosen the path of parenting. As paths go, it's highly recommended. People who are farther down this path look back at those at the crossroads and wonder what they're waiting for. Maybe by this time next year, so will we.

Right now, it just seems really uncertain and abstract. I feel like I'm giving up so many of my possible futures for the future of someone I've never met. So when I'm going through another pile of junk and having to decide what to let go, I resent the baby for forcing me to make the choice. And then when I hold something up to my husband to ask if he really needs it, he resents me. This nesting stuff sucks.

I know that this is total selfishness. It's not like I'm sad because the baby is taking away from my time feeding the homeless. The things I am clinging to are just things, and those unfulfilled futures are way less abstract than the being head-butting me in the gut right now. I have had an amazing amount of freedom in my life, a freedom that would be unheard of the vast majority of humans in history. I didn't even use it all that well. I know all that.

I'm just trying to transition from a life where I only had to decide for myself to one where I have to think about someone else first, all the time. I felt ambivalent about having children before I got pregnant. I guess I expected to feel more excited by now. One more pregnancy symptom that's not all it's cracked up to be.

st. genevieve.

Genevieve told the people of Paris to stay home and pray, that God would not abandon them. Then later, Atilla and his huns passed the city by and continued south. Too bad for the city of Orleans that they had no Genevieve (though later they would have a Joan).

The king of the Franks, Clovis, founded an abbey for Genevieve, where she was later buried. Miracles happened at her tomb, and Genevieve became a saint, the patron saint of Paris. Over a thousand years later, with the abbey falling apart, an ailing King Louis XV promised to build a new church for her if he recovered. He did, and construction began in 1757. Other things besides church construction were going on in France, and so the building was not completed until 1790.

The Catholic church was in pretty good with the monarchy. The church didn't pay taxes, but they enforced tithing, which sounds a lot like taxes. Those tithes were not redistributed to the poor. When the people rose up and said enough of these silly kings and their silly nobles, the church went down too. Money and property and held by the church was taken by the state to fund the war. The clergy was forced to say an oath to the Civil Constitution. Some of them were forced to marry. Genevieve's remains were publicly burned. Priests were slaughtered, houses of worship were destroyed or turned into Temples of Reason. The Cult of Reason was established, followed by the Cult of the Supreme Being, and secular festivals replaced religious ones.

And in the meantime, the new and beautiful church built for Genevieve sat empty and waiting. In 1791, the National Constituent Assembly declared that the church should be a mausoleum for those who contributed to the great nation of France. They called it the Panthéon, like the temple in Rome that was built to honor all the gods. The first to be honored was a statesmen. And then they went and dug up Voltaire and put him in there, then later Rousseau. Five other heroes of the revolution were interred in the crypt, and then quickly removed as revolution gave way to counter-revolution. But everyone still agreed about Voltaire and Rousseau.

It turned out that state-enforced secularism worked no better than state-enforced religion. Christianity went underground, humbled and battered, but not dead. Those killed were recognized as martyrs.

Napoleon figured out a third way, where the Catholic church, plus the Jews and the Protestants, was subsidized by the state. The upper chamber of the Panthéon was made a church, leaving the crypt for the great men of France. After the emperor was exiled, the kings came back and the Panthéon became a church again. The tombs of Voltaire and Rousseau were hidden. Another king gave the building back to the people and then another after that made it a church again. Finally, when Victor Hugo died, everyone decided that they'd like to bury him there, and so it was back to being the Panthéon.

The end result of all this switching is that there are secular heroes of France buried downstairs. Upstairs, the walls are covered with paintings of the life of St Genevieve, plus allegorical images and statues of the republic (Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité!). It is honestly a little confused. They've got their church and their state all mixed up. And yet, it worked. I was reminded of the atmosphere of reverence you can find in the monuments to our own secular saints in Washington, D.C. Humans apparently need to worship.

All those French books I read did not really help my appreciation of the city of Paris, with the notable exception of the Panthéon. For one thing, I only knew to go there because Jack Kerouac told me about it. And then once we got to the crypt, I was able to greet all those men of letters like old friends. Voltaire! Zola! Dumas! Malraux! Hey, guys, good job with all those books! Not to mention the Curies and Louis Braille, plus a bunch of other dudes that French schoolchildren probably study, but I know nothing about. I bet all those guys have really interesting conversations when the tourists have all gone home.

The Panthéon is one of those places that does not get a lot of press. There was no line to get in. The downside of this is that most of the signs were only in French, though I think there was an English audioguide available. The building itself is amazing. I could stand open-mouthed and look at big domes and huge columns all day long. I don't know anything about architecture, but I learned something at the special exhibit they had about the guy who designed the building, Jacques-Germain Soufflot (signs in English!). It's too bad it's not more well-known, because I think a lot of Americans would be down with a patriotic church.

october 2014 books.

Aside from not posting the book write-ups, I've done a bad job lately of writing them as I go. I do a lot better if I write about a book pretty soon after I've read it, rather than after I've read three other books besides. That did not happen much this month.

Ironweed
William Kennedy
Is it just me, or are a lot of the Great Books really depressing? I'm happy to take others word for it that a book is great, and this particular one had a Pulitzer committee touting it. And there are many incredibly sad books that I have loved. This one just bummed me out.

Set during the Depression, this is the story of a vagrant named Francis returning to his home town. He left to become a drifter years and years ago after dropping and killing his baby. While he is going about, finding odd jobs, drinking his little pay, hanging out with other miserable souls, and finding somewhere warmish to sleep, he relives events from his past that are brought back by seeing his old stomping grounds.

There is some hope and redemption at the end when he visits his wife and children. They show him amazing kindness, considering he was an alcoholic father at best and an absent one for the most part. There seems to be a chance for reconciliation, but the author leaves it open-ended as to whether Francis will be able to accept their forgiveness.

The Known World
Edward P. Jones
Alright, vagrancy isn't your bag, how about some slavery?

The book focuses mainly on one farm, owned by a black man and his wife. The man himself is a former slave whose father bought his freedom as a child. Now that he is an adult, he has his own farm and his own slaves. The story weaves in and out of time and place, concerning people who move in and out of the main story. The structure of it was really well-done, showing how things connect without being confusing. The characters were well-written, in that each acted as you would expect them to based on their previous actions and development.

The story itself is full of nuance, told in a straight-forward manner without casting judgment.

I've been very influenced by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for the Atlantic who writes a lot about race in America and slavery's legacy. He told a story once about kids learning about slavery, and the kids being flabbergasted that anyone would put up with that level of cruelty. The kids were confident that they would revolt or just refuse to work. And some people did that, but mostly people did what they were expected, and probably you and I would do the same. We like to think of ourselves as special and outside of history, but if millions of people acted that way before, we would probably be one of them. Coates' goal is to understand the slave-owner, knowing that he, too, would be the same. That's a much harder pill to swallow. This book seemed to be exploring that as well, with characters in all kinds of slightly varied roles in the slave society - slave and slave-owner, but also former slave, black servant, local law, foreman.

Certain Women
Madeleine L'Engle
I'd never read any of L'Engle's adult fiction. In fact, I read A Wrinkle in Time only once, long ago, and didn't really get it, despite the fact that allegorical fantasy novels are totally my thing. I think I will give it another try.

But not based on this. It was fine. It takes us through the last few days of a dying Broadway actor. His wife and daughter are tending to him as they reminisce about the old theatre days. We spend the most time with the daughter, who takes us back through the actor's nine (!) marriages. The actor has always wanted to play King David, who also had a whole slew of wives. The tales of the marriages and the children that came of them are woven and related to the stories of King David. While some of the wives are distant, for the most part, they all form a giant extended family, centered around this one patriarch. My experience with families built on multiple marriages has been very complicated and frequently tense. Some of that is shown here, but mostly it is just messy in the way that real life and real families are, but still full of love.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Speaking of Ta-Nahisi Coates, I read this as part of his book club. We read a couple chapters a week, and then had an online discussion about what we read. I did the reading and followed the discussion, but did not participate.

The idea of this book is that our current legal system has created an undercaste that happens to be mostly minorities. I can't say whether this is intentional, whether those who designed the system were really wanting to do this to keep black people down. But I can't argue with the results. I don't think it matters whether it's intentional.

The thing is, I think most people are racist to some extent. Our society is pretty segregated, and we all hold some bias, which affects our behavior. So if I'm in my car at night at a stoplight, and I see some people on the sidewalk, I'm more likely to feel scared and lock my doors if they are black. So take my small, individual racism and multiply it by every person involved in the criminal justice system, from the scared lady in her car to the officer called to the scene to the attorneys and judges. That guy, by being black, just looks more like a criminal and is treated accordingly on every single level (Alexander goes into great detail about the difference of how people are treated at every step in the process).

Now, he may very well be breaking the law, because he's got some weed in his pocket. But so may a white dude. The rate of drug use across the races is pretty even. About the same percentage of white people do drugs as do blacks and hispanics. But the rate at which people are arrested for possession is wildly skewed. Black and brown people are more likely to be stopped and searched for looking suspicious, and then they can be arrested because it turns out they have a joint. So they look criminal because we have defined more of them as criminals. It never occurred to me before that the status of criminal is defined solely by the law.

Once a person is a felon, that's where the idea of the undercaste comes in. I know a guy who was selling weed to his friends, and he got busted. He had a support system that was able to get him representation (not true of many, many people), so he did not go to prison, but he was a felon. It's really hard to find a job and housing when you are a felon. It's right there on the applications, a little box that you have to check that says sometime in the past, you were found guilty of a felony. And a lot of places will just throw out your application right then. When you can't find a job or a place to live, crime becomes a lot more likely. In many places, you cannot vote or serve on a jury. You're not even a citizen anymore.

Now, I can relate to people not wanting felons in their apartment buildings or at their jobs. There is a lot of room for debate about the status of being a felon (although it seems like letting them vote is a no-brainer). But the Drug War turns a lot of people into felons, people who haven't hurt anyone (except arguably themselves). And it does so very, very unevenly.

What I found most frustrating is that there have been court cases that show that something is rotten here by using the data to compare how blacks fare in the system versus whites. But the cases get thrown out, because rarely is someone ever caught saying something openly racist. Our racism is no longer overt. Everyone knows it's wrong to be racist, and so they assume no one is. These court decisions were infuriating. They basically acknowledged there was a problem, then said that if they did anything about this one case, it would mean the whole system was broken.

But...but...IT IS.

A coworker and I were talking about that guy in Nevada who held the feds off their own land and then made some comments about how black people were better off as slaves. My coworker said he didn't think the guy was actually a racist, because he probably didn't hate black people. Guess what: You don't have to hate anyone to be a racist. You just have to think they, as a group, are all the same as each other and are all different from you.

I barely scratched the surface here. There's a lot more about the dilution of our fourth amendment rights (prohiting unwarranted search and seizure), the militarization of the police, poverty and segregation, and what can be done.

The Natural
Bernard Malamud
This is my second Malamud book, the first being The Fixer, which was one of those incredibly depressing Great Books, one that I loved. Since reading that, I've been on the lookout for Malamud. That one was about anti-semitism in Russia. This one is about baseball. It is still sad.

A young baseballer named Roy Hobbs is on his way to Chicago to try out for the Cubbies. His career is stopped before it begins by a crazed woman with a gun. Fifteen years later, he finally gets on a losing team. Seeing as he is still a natural at the game (get it?), he soon turns the team around and they have a shot at the pennant. Hobbs becomes a local hero, fame gets to him, there's a dame or two and some baseball politics, and it all comes down to a final game.

I knew there was a Robert Redford movie based on this book, but I haven't seen it. However, I just read in the wikipedia article that the ending is basically the opposite of how the book goes. Not to spoil a sixty-year-old book and a thirty-year-old movie, but the movie has a happy ending where no one fails anyone or dies in obscurity. I try to be a sophisticated reader, but I honestly would've liked a happy ending. Not that I expected it, having read Malamud before, but I would've liked it. No one likes baseball to be sad.

Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Kathleen Norris
I think that my sister-in-law gave me this book a decade or so ago. According to the bookmark, I got two-thirds of the way through. I remember enjoying it at the time, so I'm not sure why I abandoned it.

The author, having grown up in the church, wandered away as an adult and then come back, wants to reclaim many of the scary or loaded words of faith. Each chapter is a rumination on a specific word or concept in Christianity, dismantling it and re-examining it from new angles. I sympathize with her intentions here - so much language in the church has been corrupted by overuse or abuse.

Norris is a poet, and her understanding of faith shows this. I have come to the conclusion in the past couple of years that a poetic lens is about the only one I can use for faith to make any sense at all. The tricky thing is that I am not a poet. While I can read her interpretation and understand that it makes sense in a wibbly-wobbly fuzzy-wuzzy kind of way, and I can even appreciate and see the beauty and truth in that, sometimes I really get hung up on the fact that words do mean actual things. And yet, that wibbly-wobbly, fuzzy-wuzzy kind of way is the only path to faith that I have found I can walk.

For example, she does a chapter on the creeds. We say the Nicene Creed every week as part of our service, and I do it, but I feel conflicted about it. The creed seems so confident about things that I am not sure about at all. She would say that I shouldn't be so literal about it, that anything that contains the lines "Light from light, true God from true God" is obviously using a lot of hand-waving in the first place. Her chapter on the Virgin Mary talks about alternate definitions of virgin that have nothing to do with sex. You could certainly do that with every single word in the creed or even in scripture - stretch it out with mystery until it's so vague and clouded that it could mean anything. While I believe very firmly that words are fickle, tricky things, part of me really clings fast to saying no, words mean things.

See, this is why I like numbers. It's also why I struggle with poetry. It means different things to different people, and it may not mean anything at all. That is maddening. And yet I married a poet and may be possibly carrying a tiny new poet, so clearly something in me is attracted to that. I just don't get it.

Anyway, she's very reassuring that she struggled with a lot of things in her faith, it's a lifelong journey, blah blah blah. She says that she in all her struggles, the only thing that was really clear was that she was drawn to church, and that is enough. Hallelujah.

I appreciate that if I come back to this book at different times in my life, I will probably be struck by different chapters. It makes me wonder what struck me all those years ago.

In the Lake of the Woods
Tim O'Brien
O'Brien is another of those writers that I will always read. He writes a lot about the Vietnam War. This book started out talking about a politician who has just lost an important race and likely ended his career. He and his wife take to the woods to get away from the media and reassess their lives. And then the wife disappears.

The book goes back and forth between the present, where everyone is searching for the wife, and the past, dealing with the politician's alcoholic father, his childhood interest in magic, his time in Vietnam (there it is), and his adult life, including his political career and marriage. There are periodic chapters labeled "Hypothesis," which offers varying possible explanations on what happened to the wife. Maybe she wandered off and got lost, maybe the husband killed her, maybe she left him. Guess what, the answer is never revealed.

The time in Vietnam ends up being what brought the guy's political career down. He was involved in the My Lai massacre, which is pretty rough reading even in terms of Vietnam literature. He was there by accident, and he didn't actively participate in it, but afterwards, when he was assigned a clerk, he shuffled some paperwork so it looked like he was never there. And that's really what got him in trouble, though if his involvement had been known from the beginning, perhaps he never would have had a political career. I felt pretty sympathetic to the guy. Anyone could end up being there.

The Chosen
Chaim Potok
This was excellent. It's a story about a pair of Orthodox Jewish friends growing up in Brooklyn during and after World War II. One of the boys is Hasidic, while the other is just plain old Orthodox. He seems downright worldly compared to his friend. Their friendship is strained by what's going on in the world, mainly by the creation of Israel. It was news to me that some Jews were violently anti-Zionist. Their view was that only God could give them Israel, and for man to do it through politics was a betrayal. The other guys were thinking that God works through politics, too.

I learned a lot about Judaism and Hasidic Judaism in particular. What struck me was their devotion to studying the Talmud. Hours and hours of study followed by hours and hours of debate. The author finds the Hasidic rigidity frustrating, but he says that they have been crucial in keeping the faith alive through persecution and relocation.

You know, if I'd written this right after I finished the book, I'd have a lot more to say. Grr.

church tourism.

Something Josh and I like to do is go to church while on vacation. I feel like a Crazy Church Lady mentioning that. When I was a kid, we kept attendance in Sunday School on a chart with smiley stickers. If you were absent one week, no sticker. However, if you had attended church elsewhere, that did count for a sticker. Our family didn't go off very much, and when we did, being away from our home church was excuse enough to skip services. I mean, you really have to be sticker-crazy to do something like go to church on vacation.

And here we are.

Josh in general is much more faithful than I am, and I think he feels different when he misses church, as if he missed his weekly soul-bath. For me, I've become interested in seeing how the experience of worship varies from church to church. We tend to stick to Episcopal churches, which I suppose limits the anthropological aspects of our visits. I dunno, it's nice to have a team.

It's funny, when we started going to the Episcopal church, I was pretty thrown by the liturgy. There is so much of it, and while you can follow in the bulletin, it seems like everyone else already knows the little things that are not printed. There's extra kneeling and bowing and crossing yourself. Now that I've been there a while, I'm pretty good at the words and the flow. I do not know all the times I'm supposed to be crossing myself, because I don't really do it at all. It doesn't seem to matter. Plus, since Episcopalians all use the same book, when I go to another church, there is a sense of familiarity in using the same words in a different setting. And so I feel the comfort of home while being far away. I notice that I do more crossing and bowing when I'm visiting another congregation, as if I am trying to signal that I'm in the know.

A couple of months back, while visiting Josh's dad in the mountains, we went to one of the churches of the frescoes. These are three tiny churches in the mountains that are local tourist spots for their murals. Two of the churches share one congregation, and they switch off month to month where they meet. This church was familiar to me in a couple of different ways - the small, rural congregation and the music (those things are possibly related). Whenever we got to the next song in the bulletin, I would whisper to Josh, "I know this one!" Our home church has some very talented people in charge of the music, and so the selections often seem chosen to broaden our horizons. I've gotten used to it, but it's still really exciting when I don't have to watch the notes to figure out where the next one is (and I don't technically read music - I'm seriously just going with up or down here). Obviously, familiarity is an important aspect to my church life.

The priest in that congregation also made a remark when asking for prayer requests. His daughter was up in New York, marching for climate change awareness. He prefaced it by saying that he didn't know how we all felt about the climate change issue, but he'd like us to pray for his daughter's safe travels, either way. Meanwhile, our church sent a delegation to that same march.

Everyone was very nice. They were excited to see young people (most people seemed retired), and had they been able to tell that I was pregnant, they might have offered us homes to move into. After the service, there was a coffee hour with such a spread that it required proper plates and silverware.

Then, in San Francisco, we visited the church of Saint John the Evangelist. There were two Episcopal churches that were close to where we were staying, and I actually used the online reviews to pick one. One review in particular sold me on this one. A guy remarked that he wanted to find a place to have his daughter baptized, just to make his mom happy. Twelve years later, he was still going. That's how they getcha.

Guys, everything you think about San Francisco is true, and it's even true at church. We were using my phone to navigate our walk, and then I saw a big sign that said "MORE LOVE," and I knew we'd found it. I had never seen such diversity at church. There were people of all ages and classes. One of the acolytes was a crossdresser. The congregation was small, but it was truly a family. For communion, there wasn't really an altar to kneel at, so we all stood in a big circle together.

Climate change did not come up, but I feel confident I know how they feel about it. They offered praise for the anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down and a recent law that had passed, re-classifying certain non-violent offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, causing the release of thousands of prisoners. They had been keeping a weekly anti-war vigil downtown since 2003. I didn't know any of the songs, though they were from the same hymnal we use. Again, everyone was so nice and so glad to see us. They had shrimp(!) at their coffee hour.

Maybe I just like church people. They come in all flavors and have varying views on politics, music selection, and food. But the thing they have in common is what they have in common with us: they showed up this morning. Here we all are. They don't know who we are, but they're awful glad we came.

dim sum.

It was lunchtime in Chinatown, which was in my plan. Actually, that was pretty much the entirety of my plan: Chinatown (lunch).

We walked into an unassuming place on a sidestreet. It was small and crowded with an atmosphere like a cafeteria. There were large tables, mostly filled up with Asian people (a good sign). There was no sign telling us to wait or seat ourselves, so we stood there awkwardly and looked confused. After a short delay, a man held up 2 fingers and directed us to a long table, where an old lady and an old man were already seated, though not together. Quickly, we were given small plates, chopsticks, a pot of tea, and two mugs. The only thing we could figure to do was pour the tea, and then we sat and waited. No menu, but I doubted we'd be able to read one if we had it.

A lady came by, pushing a cart of food. I'd love to tell you what kind of food, but I don't know what it was. There were a bunch of little metal pots, each with some kind of meat-looking substance. Our table-mates, clearly old pros, said something to the lady. She gave them each a little pot, and they both started mixing up the meat stuff with the rice hidden underneath. The old lady's meat stuff had small bones in it. She also poured some brown goop from a jar on the table into it.

These words I'm using make it sound unappetizing. It was not, but nor was it necessarily appealing, because I just had no idea what I was even looking at. It smelled pretty good.

The cart lady continued on her way to the other tables. Another lady came up to us and spoke to Josh, but all I heard was "potstickers." He said yes, which is a reasonable reply to any sentence containing the word "potstickers." She went away to her cart and came back with a plate of 3 potstickers. She used a scissors to cut one in half. She whipped a blank bill from her back pocket and drew a line on it, seemingly at random, then left it on the table.

Well, I know what to do with a potsticker. Man, it was delicious.

In the list of things before us, you'll notice that none of them was a fork. Once, a few years ago, I went to a Korean place in Raleigh where I also was not given cutlery. Rather than ask, I determined that day was just going to have to be the day I learned to use chopsticks. I didn't leave hungry, so I did okay. Since then, when forks are offered, I take and use them, but I feel confident enough in my chopsticking that I can manage without embarrassment. I probably look like Bambi learning to walk, but I imagine everyone else giving me credit for trying.

Our potstickers vanquished, we sat to wait again. I'd been very alert the whole time, trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. The only thing I really noticed was that the other non-Asian folk there all looked as bewildered as we were, while the locals looked as if this were their regular Tuesday lunch.

Soon, another cart lady came by. Josh pointed at one thing, and I pointed at another. Out came the scissors to cut the third one in half, two more random marks on the ticket. The item that Josh picked out, I would have left on the cart, because it looked suspiciously like mushrooms. But we think it was actually eggplant, combined with yet more meat substance, probably seafood. The one I picked looked like a biscuit, and it turned out to be some kind of fried shrimp pastry. Again, all delicious.

A middle-aged Chinese couple sat at the remaining two empty chairs at our table. They said something to one of the cart ladies, who brought them something that had either tentacles or noodles or both.

Like everything else, the tea was excellent. Technically, I am off caffeine while pregnant, but I was not going to attempt to bring that up. I just enjoyed it and everything else without having much of any idea of what I was consuming.

After our three plates, Josh decided we'd better be done, since we had no idea how much each of those marks on the ticket was costing us. I was sated anyway. We took our mysterious ticket to the counter, where we were told we owed $9.35. Well then. We could've had a couple of those meat/rice pots and still come in under budget.

After we left, I learned that what we had just experienced, the tea, the carts with the little pots, was dim sum. It's sorta like Chinese tea time. And now that I've experienced it once, I could do it again.

loser pants, again.

Josh and I recently went on a babymoon, which I just learned is a trip you take with your spouse before your baby comes and your lives are ruined. I'd been thinking about doing something like this, and then Josh suddenly announced he wanted to go to San Francisco because there was an art installation by Ai Wei Wei at Alcatraz. You know me, I am always down to visit an old prison, so I booked us some tickets and a room and we were on our way.

We had a brief layover in Charlotte before going on to San Francisco. How brief? Long enough for us to wander around Concourses B and C, but too short for me to get gelato. Too short for us to enjoy the rocking chairs in the main square, but long enough for me to lose my wallet.

Yeah, that is not being a good traveler. I must've been wearing my loser pants.

I really can't say what happened. We got off the flight from Raleigh, and I took out my wallet to get my boarding pass for the next flight. I stuck the pass in my pocket, and then...I have no idea. I would have assumed that I put my wallet back in my purse, but that is apparently not what happened. I was carrying my coat over my purse, and I think maybe I somehow missed the purse entirely and just shoved my wallet between my coat and purse, where it eventually dropped to the floor. And then someone picked it up, grabbed all the cash and tossed the rest into the trash. That's what I would've done, anyway. (No, no, I would've have turned it in to the airline).

I was able to get on the plane, since I had my boarding pass. Josh suggested we not go at all, but I was not going to miss an already-paid-for trip. We'd just have to figure the rest out as we went. I had a six hour flight to feel like a bonehead.

The first question was how I would get home without an ID. The second was how we were going to pay for anything without my credit card.

I am not writing this from my new home in California, so I must've made it home. I'll tell you how. Before we left the San Francisco Airport, we flagged down a TSA agent and asked what to do. Surely I am not the only one wearing loser pants on vacation. She told me that they would have to ask me questions from a super secret government database full of information about me to verify my identity. I would also have my bags specially searched, and I would receive the pat-down.

That was about how it went. We got there super early, and I had to tell the TSA agent that I had no ID. They pulled me aside to get someone higher up. Everyone seemed mildly annoyed, and no one seemed to consider me anything more than a silly lady who lost her wallet. Before calling up the super secret government database, the agent asked if I had anything at all with my address on it, like prescriptions or a checkbook or even mail. This part did not seem very secure, but as it happened, I wasn't carrying any of those things. So we went into the airport employee cafe, the agent called a number and then asked me about where I went to college and who lived at my house. And that was it. I got the extra searches, which again was not a big deal. The whole thing took maybe an extra half hour. I still do not recommend losing your wallet on vacation.

As for the money, well, that was a bit tense. We were at the mercy of Josh's checking account. I keep most of the household money in my accounts, and he holds no credit cards. He had some money in his accounts and some cash on hand, but we would need to be minding our finances pretty closely. It's not that we were really strapped, just that we could not be as free as we might have liked. Luckily, a few things were already paid for: our room, our tickets home, and our Alcatraz tickets. We ate cheaply, which wasn't a bad thing at all. I used the UrbanSpoon app to filter restaurants by location and price range, so we were able to spend less than $10 apiece per meal, and we still ate some dang tasty food. We also made good use of the grocery store near where we were staying, so we had fruit and chocolate croissants for breakfast every day.

Around the middle of the week, I figured out how to transfer money from my account to his account using my phone. After that, we were able to be a bit more spendy, just in time for us to go to the local thrift stores!

Before all that, though, while I was still on the plane feeling crummy, Josh did his best to console me. After talking over everything, I was starting to feel okay about the whole thing. Sure, I'm a bonehead, but it looks like we can make this work and still have a nice babymoon. And then I was looking at the printed Alcatraz tickets, where it said "PHOTO ID REQUIRED." It was the whole dang reason we came. Why do you need ID to go to a prison?

I called the Alcatraz cruises office to inquire just how strict they were about the ID thing. The guy said that they didn't check it, but if we were boarded by the Coast Guard and I did not have photo ID, I would be detained. How often does this happen?, I asked. He sorta laughed and said it must've happened at least once.

I figured I'd take my chances.