Happy birthday to me!

I do plan on celebrating a little more than a matcha latte and a piece of
chocolate -- but for the record that wouldn't be so terrible if that were
the extent of what I did today.

I have much to celebrate. A sister who is autistic and nonverbal has been
having a number of scary symptoms for several weeks. My mother, who has
been her primary caretaker, is suffering with her own issues...etc. Suffice
to say that getting my sister in for a procedure yesterday required not
only the help of another sister, my husband, and some kind nurses, but also
the planning I'm known for. And maybe a couple of minor miracles.

I am happy to report that she is fine or will be in a few weeks. Of all the
problems it could have been, this is the one that I would have picked.
Thank you, universe.

I also celebrate that I feel so much better for this birthday than I did
for the last one. I had just left what turned out to be my final chemo
session the day before, which required me to be in the hospital five days,
but I could only endure four. And that day also featured the chest pains my
team was watching for, and which ultimately determined that my sessions
were ending. It was not the worst day ever -- I had my family -- but this
one is already better. Indulging in an early morning walk instead of
sitting in the dark for a few hours is even better than the latte.

Finally, the last few days have been tempered with more bitter news.
Another close relative learned that a health problem they had vanquished
years ago had returned for a repeat performance. It is frightening, since
this person is now that much older. However, and I mean this, in this case
that may turn out to be a good thing, not least because it also means
medical science has had that much longer to improve.

Aging can save our lives.

Let's endure those bad days and scary times so we can enjoy early mornings,
matcha, chocolate, good news, and family.

Deb in the City

PS The latte was very good

--
Sent from my GO FLIP 3

I am done drafting!

No, really, though I don't blame you if you don't believe me.

I have been working on drafting this speculative fiction project since 2017. In my defense, it's a lot of story. Also in my defense: family health, my health, and the pandemic.

Also in my defense: you can only guess how long it took me to draft my second novel, which I actually started writing more than twenty years before the first. This story had also been rattling around for about two decades before I started writing it. Also, the story is actually sixteen different pieces of varying lengths, although that might change.

But did I mention that the draft is finally done?

I am taking the month of September off. I will not touch the story until October 1 when I am ready to start transcribing. In the meantime, I'm going to delve into the myriad projects that have been making the back of my head itchy, including but not limited to:

• my "personal knowledge management project" which includes taking "temporary" notes from just a few more books and going over my other notes to turn them into permanent notes
• differential equations
• chemistry
• learning more of the Korean language (at this point I think I need a conversation partner, or will soon)
• planning a thrifty kitchen renovation
• sending out newsletters again
  

I want to say that's all I'm going to have to do for the month of September, but it isn't. Some are joyful -- going to my sister-in-law's wedding -- and some are excruciating (dealing with a parent's declining health as well as procedures for a sibling's health issues). I suspect this month is going to be busy, so this is a good time to not feel the pressure of the story weighing on me. (Thank goodness for exercise.)

...and to celebrate! I'm really bad about marking milestones, but this one is important. Maybe a banger cake for my birthday at the end of the month? A good restaurant? A movie of my choice...no, never mind. But...something, even if it's just a satisfying math problem. Because this is a big deal, and it was a long time coming.

Deb in the City

I'm not that way

May and June were a little tight around here. Several big bills came in at a time when our income was a little lower than usual, and we had a bill due in a few months that we were putting funds aside for. It was tight but it wasn't desperate by any means; we were in no danger of not being able to pay bills, and when minor emergencies came up, we could attend to them. But anyone who has ever suffered from financial hardship for extended periods of time knows how traumatizing it can be. As with all traumas, they can be triggered with surprising ease, never mind what you intellectually know and even believe. 

Thus in June I found myself developing a very bad case of hives, and on top of that the insomnia that frequently haunts me became unbearable. I remembered something I had read in the book Move the Body, Heal the Mind about the value of more intense exercise in getting some sleep, so I decided to follow the author's plan. 

The first day found me bored out of my mind. I walk all over the place, but for this more intense, half hour walk I decided to go into one of the many green spaces near my home. It really is lovely, but after three laps around the body of water I thought I was going to jump out of my skin. However, it worked: I slept really well that night. More intense exercise does work, but I could not repeat that experiment.

The second day called for a warm up and then circuit strength training. The exercises were very doable, even though my right hip was strained, but it was still a little boring. (But again, it worked.) In desperation, I jumped onto YouTube to find something at least for the warm ups.

I stumbled upon British trainer Lucy Wyndham-Read. Her workouts are very doable and creative, and the fact that she's my age makes me take her a little more seriously. After one session, I was hooked (and, yes, my sleep has been great). I'm spending no more than thirty five minutes on my workouts (unless I'm really inspired), I'm working up a sweat, and I feel good. We're basically doing low-impact circuits of approachable light calisthenics (my downstairs neighbors just don't appreciate my higher-impact movements), and it's..fun.

It's fun, and I feel good. It's been a while since I had that combination from physical activity, and it was noticeable. I'm someone who's been physically active most of my life, so why was this different? And since this was the case, why had I spent so long tormenting myself with yoga and Pilates?

I think it comes down to performance, and once again that makes me cringe.

I just can't anymore

 

I once read something in an old Glamour magazine in the late 90s (don't ask for more specificity than that) in which someone said training for a marathon made them feel like they weren't just working out, they were now being athletic/practicing a sport. At the time I nervously nodded my head and started doing the exhausted kind of math I did in my late twenties. Must be serious about working out to the point of being an athlete...no matter how much time that took out of my already punishing schedule.

I was disturbed to realize how much I had taken not only seriousness but athleticism to heart (and no, not because of this one article). And it's probably obvious that I was very aware of what people thought of my physical activity, whether I wanted to acknowledge it or not. (Who knew being the last one picked for dodge ball stayed with you this long...)

I was a yoga teacher, and I was a Pilates instructor. When I stopped teaching, I was then a Walker, even when I had young children, and even when I was suffering with cancer. And I always felt like I should practice -- and I mean, practice -- qigong more. And even when I did something that was less doctrinaire, it had to be "fusion", or at least conscious of those modalities. And even when it wasn't, much of it was informed by the principles of dance.

Well thank goodness for weight training...except that always had to be done "correctly". I don't just mean form -- please, your form is extremely important if you lift weights! -- but the methodology -- the thinking -- behind all of the moves had to be logical. Squats, deadlifts, and shoulder presses were my holy trinity, because they got your whole body and you wouldn't waste any time and that was what people who were serious about weightlifting did.

There were many times when I would exercise and I would feel better afterward, but it was always tempered with "how can I improve?", "did I do that as well as I could have?", "did I do it correctly?", and, of course, "what would other people think?" The hell of it was always -- always -- that unless I did something unapproachable for many people -- walk for a really long time, do something that required a lot of core strength, or push into my flexibility -- my modalities were silly or girly or not going to give me Results or just not serious enough and why was I bothering? 

Honestly, a lot of times I hated working out, but for the last week I haven't. And did I mention that I feel good? That is worth me no longer having a respectable identity. I am not a yogi. I am not a Pilates practitioner. I am not a qigong student. I am not a dancer. I am not a weight trainer. I am not even a super duper walker. 

I just work out. And I feel good. Oh yeah, I also sleep really well.

Deb in the City

When "They" Come

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

I've known that quote since I was a child -- in the Eighties, the good old days when we talked about totalitarians without perverse admiration -- and I think of it all the time now. Jews do very often still have targets on our backs, but the socialists, trade unionists, and Lutherans seem to be safe. For now.

The people that "they" are coming for now are the LGBTQIA+ among us, with particular emphasis on trans people, especially children. That should horrify anyone who contemplates it, except people with totalitarian streaks never factor in youth as something that should protect anyone. Just ask the Indigenous children of Canada and the United States who were stolen from their parents and killed in institutions. Just ask the poor Black, Brown, and White children who are imprisoned. 

"They" are coming for the children in the schools, and under the guise of protection (from facts, from history), they are limiting what can be both explicitly taught in an official curriculum and implicitly inferred through fiction. And when they come for those children, they come for teachers, who can lose their livelihoods and have reason to fear for their safety.

"They" come for the children, the teachers, the people browsing in a mall, the people shopping for food, when they continue to be unimpressed by the numbers of people killed with assault weapons never meant to see action by civilians. No laws are changed so that fewer guns will make it onto the streets; instead, the laws are being reworked such that it is now that much easier for people to purchase guns.

"They" come for women who aren't wealthy -- and the people who love them -- by making it increasingly impossible to safely terminate a pregnancy. By trying to make it illegal for such women to leave for states where they could have a safe medical procedure. By removing safe and proven drugs for abortions from the markets. By making it illegal for someone to help a woman who needs an abortion. By making women carry unsafe pregnancies to term. 

"They" have consistently been coming for Jews, and since 2001, for Muslims. And Asian Americans. They are killing Black men for being poor and desperate. They are kidnapping, raping, and murdering Indigenous women and children. They piloted all of this on the Indigenous and on enslaved Black people. 

Eventually, "they" will come for all of us. You don't think so? You are wrong. Your wealth does not protect you. Your religion does not protect you. Your ancestry does not protect you. Sooner or later, they come for us all.

You may think that when "they" come, you will be on the winning side. You're safe -- you're white, you're Christian, you don't ask for "handouts". You're just the kind of person "they" say they are doing all of this in the service of. You are wrong, because they are lying. You are just their excuse until they don't need one. 

Eventually, when "they" win, they rewrite reality. 

"They" are already telling your children what is safe to read. They are already taking books out of bookstores. They are already threatening people for living proudly, as they are. They have long been redrawing voting maps to entrench power. (They are even doing it in Boston, but then again, we started it.) They will eventually tell you what you can say. And then they will tell you what you can think.

And this is only the start. One piece of information I always remember from the book Revolution 1989 was the temperature in Romania. There was a law that stated that when the temperature dropped low enough, the state was required to turn the central heating in buildings on. Toward the end of the Soviet era, the Iron Bloc countries were looking to save money (when they weren't trying to siphon it off). Their solution? The temperature rarely reached the cutoff. The result? Hundreds of elderly Romanians froze to death in their homes. 

The Ceausescu government could control the temperature in the winter because they could control reality. And what was going to stop them? A thermometer? Another scientific instrument? Please.

Living like that is madness, and the price of survival is your sanity. And that is how they get us all.

Don't fool yourself that you can find a safe haven. Somehow, in the midst of all of this, you must have missed anti-Muslim activity (and massacres) in India. You must have missed the anti-LGBTQIA+ statements out of Turkey made by Erdogan before his dreaded victory. You must have missed Viktor Orban in Hungary. You must have missed the Arab League welcoming a butcher back into their fold. You must have missed China committing genocide. You must have missed the president of South Korea getting rid of the Gender Equality Ministry. (But surely you have not missed Russia.) When "they" finally arrive in full force, there is nowhere you can go where they can't eventually find you. There is no escape -- so let's change it now.

Go vote, but let's be real and acknowledge that the corruption of all three branches at the federal and local levels means that our votes are dulled -- which doesn't mean there's no point in voting, but that everyone needs to participate. 

Voting isn't everyday, but opportunities to speak out are. Protect those who are vulnerable (there is no "most" at this point). Protect LGBTQIA+ people. Protect the Indigenous. Protect Black and Brown people. Protect women. Protect the disabled. Protect Jews. Protect Muslims. Protect children. Protect the elderly. Protect the poor. (And understand how many of those identities frequently intersect.) Protect anyone who is endangered by speaking out. Be that annoying person who never "lets it go", because what you're not letting go is the reality that other people are in danger. It might not work even if you try, but it definitely won't if you don't. 

"They" are coming, but they can still be met.

Deb in the City

The War on Pregnant Women

Even my feel good reading doesn't always leave me feeling good.

I try to keep abreast of current events without being in danger of winning a Breaking News-Off, and I continue to dig into historical topics, in part because it affects my fiction, in part because I have a responsibility to know what came before me, and in part because it's genuinely interesting. But I will be the first to admit that it can wear on one's psyche, and my reading list isn't the first thing I'd recommend to anyone feeling Age of COVID, Corruption, and Fascism Angst. I think there is cause for hope in history -- humanity has endured so far -- but it's hard to criticize anyone for focusing on, for example, genocide. It's a lot for anyone.

I am not, however, traumatized by the news (just incredibly annoyed with its simplistic delivery). Who knows why -- everyone's triggers are different -- but part of the credit also goes to the other things I read, including news from other countries (particularly South Korea), business and economics (boy, has that been fun lately), and science news. I don't call those things light, and it would be a mistake to say that none of it is influenced by the larger conditions around us (for some reason, a lot of science news seems concerned with the effects of rising temperatures), but there is less of a sense of doom in all of those, and it's also fair to say that business and economics is actually a place where you can sometimes find better if not good news. I think those topics give me a psychological buffer, and I encourage people who want to be "informed" but not traumatized to, generally, look at those sources.

So you can imagine how genuinely upset I was when I came across this piece a few months ago about maternal deaths in the United States two months ago. 

Did you guess that Black women died at disproportionate rates during their pregnancies and in the six weeks after? And that the problems -- the racism -- in our system make this discrepancy worse? And that the pandemic didn't do anything to alleviate those problems? Good guesses, and what I would have surmised going in.

What stopped me cold was that for all of the inequities in the medical care that so many pregnant women are subject to, what kills them and new mothers more than anything else is homicide. Raise your hand if you did not know that in the majority of those cases the perpetrator is an intimate partner, but you already know that what they are killed with more often than not is a gun. And being pregnant makes you uniquely vulnerable, in case that wasn't obvious -- women in the same age range who aren't pregnant do not die in the same numbers.

(Now just throw in that another leading cause of death for these women is suicide, and you can appreciate why this science news was more disturbing than "current events".)

This doesn't present a question, and this isn't a topic that anyone needs to "have a serious discussion" about. We do not need to ask why it is that some of the most vulnerable people among us live in such great danger and so frequently don't survive it. We need to do something about it, now. And we are doing something...it just happens to be exactly the wrong thing.

Serious question: which one is more important to you?

Our Supreme Court, which last year overturned the right to abortions and upended the lives of millions, is poised to rule on a case about -- you guessed it -- whether or not someone who has a restraining order for domestic violence against them can keep their guns. This nightmare comes from the Fifth U.S. Circuit Appeals Court, who held that the federal law violated the Second Amendment. (Fun fact: the Fifth Circuit ruling cited a dissent written by Judge Amy Coney Barrett when she was on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.) 

No, who am I kidding, this comes from the Supreme Court of the United States and their originalist ruling in Bruen last year, which set the standard the lower courts are using now. Since everyone is doing so well with my quizzes, do you remember who is responsible for the current composition of that court? I'll wait.

I was born in the Seventies, and I know what sexism looks like. I appreciate that women have made some genuine gains since then, but it is impossible to look at recent legal decisions and not see much of them being reversed. Not only is it more difficult for women to exercise agency over their bodies and protect their health -- really, what is the medical justification for forcing a woman to remain pregnant with an unviable fetus? -- these same people will not protect pregnant women. I don't need to explain it along a fascist metric; it is callous and cruel to the point of being monstrous, and we have to stop it. In other words: go vote.

Excuse me, I'm going to read more about the bizarre culture of collecting and collectors. We get our feel-goods where we can these days.

Deb in the City

K-Pop ... I know, right? (The #Clueless Blog Hop)

I am so happy to be "touring" with my posse again. Of course, because we all have such a good such sense of humor, we decided we could poke a little fun at ourselves and explore that which we do NOT know. (Thanks to Jami for being the brave blogger who kicked this tour off.) I can't speak for the rest of the crew, but for me it was hard picking something -- there's just so many things to choose from...

There are of course many things I don't get. I like to fob it off on my superior perspective -- I take the long view, I'm more worried about the well-being of everyone, I'm just a better person than everyone else -- but sometimes I simply don't have any familiarity with something and I'm too intimidated to know where to start. Like guns and other weapons, not to mention when they should be used (though I do know where and when they shouldn't be...), and why they're a good choice in that context. I can, oddly, follow military history (in more weirdness, I still think Max Boot's books on military history are great), but if you made me tell you which weapons were being used at which historical pivot points, I'd probably shout something like "tanks in World War I!" and then run away. As someone whom people actually think knows something about history, this gaping hole is a little bit of an embarrassment.

Speaking of embarrassing...If you've read this blog more than once, you may have noticed that I watch more than my share of Korean entertainment. I watch more than my Korean relatives; my thirty-something cousin (once removed) had watched The Squid Game because he didn't live under a rock, but he hadn't seen Mouse, which I thought was an infinitely better told story. I didn't even bother asking about all of the other titles, which now include The Devil Judge. I know -- what even is that title? -- but it's really good. As I've said before, South Korean entertainment is obsessed with South Korean corruption, but this brings the critique to a new level. I'm only half-joking when I say that I can trade Gaslit Nation for K-dramas and get the same content.

So, I *know* about South Korean entertainment. Hell, I know enough gossip about it that I can get the in jokes on shows like Behind Every Star (the South Korean version of Call My Agent!). And I've developed enough of an eye that I can tell when an actor is a model or a K-pop star (among other things, the K-pop stars are thinner and tend to be more "non-threatening"). But you know what? I cannot tell you ANYTHING about K-pop itself. I'm very proud of how well K-pop is doing and the effect it has on South Korea's soft power, but I wouldn't recognize a K-pop song if I fell over it, and I wouldn't recognize the members of BTS if I bumped into them. (Am I the one living under a rock?) 

Who are these people?!

It's weird that it's this way, in part because lately K-dramas have really cool soundtracks, and some of the songs are iconic. Cue Hush from Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (I know, again, these titles)...except the recording artist is Swedish. Okay, fine, but even among the Korean artists, the songs aren't what's considered K-pop (e.g., the theme song from Inspector Koo).

I think I tried listening to BTS -- it had to have been Butter -- but it just didn't grab me and I didn't make it all the way through. And then while stumbling through Spotify's suggestions, I came upon brb., this really cool boy band from Singapore. Like, damn, where have they been all my life? (I mean, nonexistent for most of it, but you know what I mean.) Their music hits that dancy, edgy, jazzy, loungey spot that I'm always looking for. (Listen to Move if that description doesn't work for you.) Okay, I digress...

The closest I've come to K-Pop is stumbling upon DPR IAN, which led me to DPR LIVE, who sometimes performs with GRAY and CL (I have no idea what these names mean either). These DPRs (okay, this I can tell you stands for Dream Perfect Regime, which is the name of their music label) technically include some rap, but what stands out for me is more the storytelling style, and the music is pretty good too. (And of course, my sample is based on the eight songs that have made it to my playlist, so I'm obviously an expert.) However, I don't feel this brings me any closer to an understanding of K-pop as a grouping of musical styles. But I can still recognize a K-pop singer on sight so...maybe I have at least one clue?

What are you clueless or even clue-free about? Please let me or the rest of the crew know. Tomorrow we are over to Kerrie, and then Caroline finishes it off on Friday.

Thanks for reading!

Deb in the City

PS Thank you in advance for the K-pop suggestions some kind soul will inevitably give me. Unfortunately, since my primary computer has gone into an unconscious state for no apparent reason, might be a little while before I can get to them.

How much stupid *is* in the economy?

I have a confession: much as I consider myself a numbers person and follow business, economic, and finance news, there is a lot that I still don't "get". I realized this week that most of it comes down to my extremely conservative nature when it comes to money. If I were going to invest in stocks, I would do it because I had researched the intrinsic value of the company and had good reason to believe that it would do well in the future. If I were going to invest in bonds -- which I had always been told before this month were so safe that they were boring and should be avoided for that reason alone -- I would do so because I believed in the strength of the entity selling it and hold it until it matured; hell, I would probably reinvest the funds after. It took me a while to remember that most people do not see their investments that way; they do not look at the long-term, and many don't even look at the medium-term. They are super-sensitive to every hiccup and will bail if they see enough people doing so, just as they will invest in something if they see enough people doing so. I have always been distrustful of the crowd, which is why I remain hesitant to trust this very emotional bunch with my financial security.

This obsession with short-term thinking, apparently, blinds people to the consequences of obvious phenomenon right in front of them...say, a decade or so of extremely low interest rates. 

I suffered through the last recession. I have complained at length about it, so I don't want to go on more about it here. I was also a conscious human being in 1987, 1990, and 2001, so I knew that another recession would come, no matter what the Treasury or Fed did to soften the impact. That is why I worked very hard to stabilize my financial circumstances. (I am not wagging my finger at anyone who wasn't able to do so; I appreciate that my family enjoyed some privileges that many others don't, and while my choices may have created some opportunities, it mostly amplified what advantages I already had.) That is also why I had a savings account and noticed that, while my accounts were modestly growing, they weren't growing as much as they might if, say, interest rates weren't consistently low.

What could possibly go wrong?

Let's agree that the world economy shouldn't pivot on my needs alone...but I somehow doubt that I was the only person in my position who had a little bit of money that I was trying to grow but didn't want to "risk". But that isn't what made the low rates so galling. They were, as far as I could see, the most durable measure that was taken after the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession, and they outlived their usefulness.

What was the point of low-interest rates? To make money more available to spend...but how? By encouraging people to borrow money. That money financed (or refinanced) mortgages, cars, educations, and businesses. Some of that might have been great -- but what about opportunities to build wealth that you didn't first have to borrow for? What about raising the minimum wage so it could be a livable wage, so that if a family had two wage- or salary-earners, they could save money? What about lowering the cost of education so that families didn't have to bet everyone's futures so one person could get a Bachelors degree? What about making it easier for people with high school diplomas or Associates degrees to get good paying jobs? What about subsidizing the cost of childcare so more parents who wanted to work could be a part of the workforce and generate more income? What about not making high end residential developments so easy to build -- with that cheap and easy money -- and driving up the cost of housing for everyone in the process?

Yeah, I guess keeping interest rates low was much easier than attacking those problems. A shame no one reminded people who worked with money for a living as well as the vast majority of our elected representatives about long-term consequences.

Here we are, and there's nothing we can do to change it except move forward. Here's hoping everyone remembers that nothing lasts forever and plans accordingly, especially those we trust to plan for us. (One last thing I'll say: cryptocurrency really shouldn't be your backup plan.)

Deb in the City