modern life

April is the cruelest month.

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What the poet says, but for different reasons. For me, April is the month with the most unpleasant associations.

Tax day, for sure; I always panic come IRS time, even though I haven’t done anything wrong. (My tax guy at Block Solutions says his experience is that the honest people are the most nervous, whereas the push-the-envelope or outright sleazy types are completely fine with the annual forms.)

But April is also the month of my ex’s birthday and also our wedding anniversary. His birthday is April 1 – insert your own punchline here. (I certainly have.)

Our anniversary is much more troubling. That was the day I entered into what would become 23 years of gradually unfolding torment. As I was getting dressed for the wedding, my sisters and my mom joked that there was still time: They had fast cars and could sweep me and my daughter out of there.

Now I think maybe they weren’t joking.

On the other hand, if I hadn’t married him I would never have made it to Alaska – which changed my life on several levels.

 

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15 things I like to do.

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My blogging buddy and former* Get Rich Slowly boss J.D. Roth recently posted an article called “How to find purpose in your life: 12 powerful exercises to help you discover purpose and passion.”

Among those exercises was one called “20 things you like to do,” which is just what it sounds like: Make a list of 20 things – and it must be 20 – that you like to do.

With those items you’re supposed to create a chart with columns like “when did you last do this thing,” “is it free or is there a monetary cost,” “solitary or social,” “planned or spontaneous” and several other descriptors.

J.D. admits he could list only 16 things he likes to do. Even better: “Playing computer games” was the first one he thought of, whereas “sex” was the second thing to come up (as it were).

Not only does he admit it (not sure I would have!), J.D. pokes fun at himself before the readers had a chance: “Kind of sad (and hilarious) to note that this list is in the order I thought of things.”

I decided to bounce off his post and give a list of 20 things I like to do. Trouble is, I couldn’t make it to 20 things either. Maybe that means my tastes are refined, or maybe it means that I’m a pretty boring person.

Note: These are in no particular order. In fact, one of the most important things I like to do is found at the end.

 

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Hey, Josh Radnor: You’re frugal.

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The other day I read an article about Josh Radnor, the actor who played Ted Mosby on the television series “How I Met Your Mother.” Now 43, he talked about staying in his $750-a-month sublet for the first two years of the show, even though it was a megahit.

“You don’t know, as an actor, how sustainable things are going to be, how long things are going to last,” he told CNBC.

Finally he bought a house – the last person in the cast to do so – and by the end of the series he’d made the Forbes list of the highest-paid television actors, earning $10 million (salary plus syndication bucks).

Normally I don’t write about celebs, but I want to highlight something Radnor said in the article:

“It’s not that I’m frugal. I don’t mind spending money if I believe in the thing. (But) there’s not a lot of stuff I look at in the world and say ‘Oh, man, I gotta have that’.”

As long as we’re doing TV today, I’m going to paraphrase Eleanor Shellstrop* from “The Good Place”: Josh Radnor…Ya frugal!

 

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Stormy Daniels: Rabbi Ruttenberg explains it all for you.

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Today I found a series of tweets about Stormy Daniels from Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, an author and speaker. Rabbi Ruttenberg put into words the irritation I’ve been feeling lately about the furor surrounding Daniels and the U.S. president.

Short form: What Daniels does for a living isn’t the issue here. Stop making it about her, and stop thinking that her job choice makes her testimony somehow less true.

But the rabbi says it so. much. better. than I did, so I’m reproducing her thoughts here.

Note that she’s calling out those on the Left as well as on the Right.

I want to say a thing about the slut-shaming language I’ve seen around Stormy Daniels. A few words about why what she does for a living doesn’t matter in this story, and then a few more on when it does.

Yes, I’m really a rabbi.

Stormy Daniels is a human person with whom the President of the United States evidently had an affair, and then paid off, and also (if I understand correctly) intimidated and threatened.

Our focus should be on his actions. His breach in his marriage (I’ll note below why that matters), his attempt to buy her silence, why he’s so invested in that silence, where the money came from and how it got transferred, and very much about these possible threats.

How she has chosen to earn money in order to pay for her groceries and whatever else (provide for sick family? set aside money for someone’s college? pay for decadent spa days? I don’t know, not my business) is irrelevant. She is news only because of what he did or didn’t do.

 

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Life in the Entitlement Zone.

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Today I spent several hours in the main public library, working at a long countertop that holds a sign saying “QUIET ZONE.”

To be utterly clear, the sign also features “no” symbols placed over a cellphone and a talking head.

Pretty straightforward, right? That rules-enforced peace is the reason I work here* fairly regularly.

And fairly regularly I’m accosted by cell yell. Today was one such day.

Hey, can you hear me?

I look up and a guy, maybe 19 years old, is approaching. Can you hear me? Yeah, what’s up? And naturally he plunks himself down in the Quiet Zone and opens up his laptop while continuing to talk.

 

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The inadvertent Pi Day.

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Yesterday found me waxing housewife-ish because DF was on his way home from a nine-day trip. After long trips I love walking into our home to find out he’s cleaned or boiled up some whale chunks. Thus I make it a point to return the favor when he goes out of town.

For starters, I washed the sheets and hung them on the line, along with the blanket and comforter. Next I opened some windows and briefly aired out the place, taking advantage of high-30s temps and a mild breeze.

Finally I baked one of his favorite dishes: homemade turkey pie. It’s kind of a pain to make because it has so many moving parts (more on that below), and this one was even more challenging because I used a bigger, deeper pie pan than usual. Since I had pastry dough left over I decided to make a raspberry-rhubarb pie as well.

Believe it or not, I’d completely spaced that today is Pi Day.

 

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Even the Tooth Fairy is cutting back.

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PF how much the Tooth Fairy paysWhen I was a kid the Tooth Fairy would bring a nickel or a dime for each lost tooth. I sorta-kinda remember getting 25 cents once, but that’s probably wishful thinking. My parents had four kids and not a whole lot of cash.

Possibly one of my classmates bragged about getting a quarter per cuspid and I dreamed it would happen to me as well.

The annual Original Tooth Fairy Poll from Delta Dental says today’s kids are getting an average of $5.70 per first tooth lost. Dang.

That’s actually a slight drop from last year’s average of $5.72 per tooth. Even so: Dang.

 

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Six good things.

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Jana from the Jana Says blog recently wrote about half a dozen good things happening in her life. The post was an antidote to a previous article in which she screamed rather primally about a whole lot of bad, frustrating stuff.

I hear her on both counts. Now I’m going to steal her format, and share half a dozen decent occurrences of my own.

(Got six good things – or even one – of your own? Do share, in the comments.)

We’ll start with something sweet:

 

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Where I’ve been.

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To quote a recent headline from my daughter’s website:

Blah.

As in, “I haven’t written much lately and I apologize. But things have been so busy that when I finally stop for the day my mind is, well, pretty blah.”

Can’t focus on brilliant new blog post ideas. Heck, I can barely focus on anything except putting out freelance fires and after that, hanging out with DF for a little while and going to bed.

Maybe it’s the long spell of gray, gray days. Maybe it’s age-related fatigue; where I once could write from morning until the midnight hour, now I just want to get away from the screen after a few hours. Whatever the reason, I just haven’t felt creative enough to write anything.

Yet I hate to have 10 days go by with nothing new up on the site. I miss you guys when I don’t post!

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Books: Why aren’t we reading them?

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At the end of the year I saw a lot of New Year’s resolutions mentioned on blogs and social media. Chief among them: “I will read more books/read a book a week.”

As a nation we aren’t doing that. According to a Pew Research study, 26 percent) of U.S. adults say they haven’t read a book – or even part of a book – in the past year.

We can’t blame Kindle Unlimited or Audible for this trend since the study encompassed e-book, audio and print formats. However, the Pew Research Center notes that adults with a high school education (or less) are three times as likely as college grads to cop to ignoring books. People who earn $30,000 a year or less are twice as likely to be non-readers.

 

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