Slate – Encyclopedia Baracktannica

This was amusing.

Slate – Encyclopedia Baracktannica

Days like this

There are the really good ones and the really bad ones, then there are the just blah ones.  I’m pretty “blah” today.  I’m feeling an inexplicable sense of sadness that doesn’t seem to have any real source.  As if I got bad news about someone or something and it’s hovering just below my consciousness.   Work has been busy this week.  The temporary slow down has not lasted, for us, at least.

Maybe it’s just that I didn’t get a good night’s sleep.  The pain level seems to uptick when I’m tired, and that makes me cranky.   Crankier.  

I was very frustrated last night.  I got a great new summer blazer on sale for $19.99 at the outlet mall.  But after getting it all ironed and ready to wear, I found that I could not squeeze into any of the pants that I’d hoped to wear with it.    I am just so frustrated and angry about being “fat.”  It is the ultimate “insult to injury” situation.  I have to be weak, disabled, sick, and now I have to be fat besides.  I feel I’m constantly hungry, and constantly forgoing food I would previously have happily wolfed down with no consequences whatsoever.  And yet I can’t make any significant impact on the scale.

I topped out at 145.something on return from the trip back East.  I got back down to what has become my new normal, around 141 by the beginning of May.  Since then it’s been a real battle.   I am currently at 138.2, but it seems to hover around 140 most of the time.  Any loss is followed by a gain the next week.   I know I’ll never be back to the 110 I was in high school, and I don’ t think I’ll even be back to the 120 I was in college, but I would like to get back to the 128-130-ish I was for the last 20 or so years.    I know – there are many people who would be thrilled to be this weight, and I don’t want to be petty our whiny.  I just want to get into my clothes, and feel good about my body again.

I guess I’m going to have to learn a whole new level of self discipline.

Nowhere (Wo)Man

I feel like the guy in the Beatles song, sitting in my Nowhere Land, making all my Nowhere Plans for Nobody.   I have not publicized my blog to anyone other than having left it in a few comments, so other than random blog surfing,  there is no way for anyone to have found it.  That’s okay for now.  I’ve thought about letting some of my friends know, particularly my small group of “Internet friends.” (Although they are much more than that now, they have become “real” friends)  Then I wouldn’t have to update as well as send e-mails.  But I think it takes away something to be relating via blogs and comments, versus just plain e-mailing when we have something to say.    I would feel a bit arrogant saying,  if you want to know what’s up with me, go to my blog, I will no longer, be e-mailing you.  No – that doesn’t work for me.

So, I might tell them, just for fun.   I haven’t told Greg, which feels a little sneaky, a little bit of a lying by omission.  If he ever asked me if I had  a blog, I’d say yes.  But I know he’d find it silly, a waste of time, and probably a little bit embarrassing.   I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t like the idea of some of the personal details of our relationship being published on the web.    That’s also why I do it semi-anonymously.  I’ve been reading a number of blogs lately, on MS and other topics, which are published publicly with the writers’ first and last names.  I’m definitely not comfortable with that.  I very definitely wouldn’t want my employees finding or reading it.      So maybe I should stop.    Nah.

 

 

I thought this would be an interesting meme: “The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.”    I’m suprised that these are the most unread several are among my favorites, but then there are also quite a few I struggled with.   I read all of the Jane Austen books in one fell swoop.  It was a long summer somewhere in the early 1980’s.   This was a good reminder of several I’d still like to read. 

Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov – two people I know have noted this as a favorite – I’d better check it out.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (This was delicious!)

The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum – maybe I finished it.  Can’t remember.  It was tedious, I recall.
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible – one of my all time favorites
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse – I didn’t really get what all the fuss was about, I thought it was tedious.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince – confused for a moment with The Little Prince, which I love.
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present  (I’m trying, really.  I’m about half way, but it’s getting old)
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon - I loved this one too!
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel

Pack Rats

I happened to surf past Oprah a few nights ago and there was a show about Pack Rats.  Not the animals, but the people.  A group of children was performing an Oprah-vention of their parents.  There was footage of a typical suburban home, piled to the ceiling with stuff.  Mostly clothes, it looked like.

 

I am a third generation pack rat.  Each of the generations has had it’s own signature, but the fact is the owning and managing and storing of “stuff” has controlled my grandmother, my mother, and now me.  I need to learn how to deacquisition before it takes over my life.

 

I am struggling to find a way to stop this, but it’s very ingrained, if not actually in my genes, it is at least a result of years of unconscious training.  I think that my mother and grandmother were probably frustrated by the housewife role, but not ambitious or motivated enough to break out of it.  So they turned to buying and collecting stuff as a way of life. 

 

After my brother and I were grown and gone and my mom was divorced, before she discovered golf there were some bad years when she was really lost and depressed.  Shopping was the only thing she seemed motivated to do.  She would buy all sorts of stuff as gifts for us – so much that we sometimes felt we were drowning in it.  Christmas we learned to handle, but it was all the other “few little things” she would send every few weeks.  I often sent boxes of charitable donations filled with unused items that still had price tags on them.   My house is small, so it was especially hard to justify owning dozens of table clothes, for example.   I think it was even worse for my brother, after his kids were born, they had the typical behavior of a grandmother, amplified by the shopping addiction.  Toy overload.

 

 

Now that she’s gone, I miss her, and I miss being loved and cared for as only a mother would do, but I don’t miss the influx of stuff.   While I do still have to deal with all the stuff still in her house, and all the stuff that has already filled my house, at least there is an end.  There is not a constant stream of new stuff. 

 

It seems that most people equate being more wealthy with having more stuff.  You make enough money to buy a bigger house, and then you have to buy more stuff to furnish the bigger house.  Then you need storage systems to store the stuff that furnishes the house.  You buy toys to play with but you never have time to play with them because you’re so busy organizing the garage, or cleaning out the attic. 

 

I know the stuff is owning me, yet I can’t seem to get rid of it. All these out of date clothes that I keep because they’ve been my favorites, and all the too small clothes that I keep because I’m not always going to be this fat. 

 

And the worst is the sentimental stuff.  Mostly around mom’s and gram’s stuff.  Ornaments that I have no real love for, other than remembering them from my childhood.  Mom’s wedding dress. Gram’s fur coats.  Dishes, china, crystal, silver.  I need a bigger house, with more room to store stuff.