I need a mildly dressy outfit for an upcoming restaurant situation, and I hate clothes-shopping. I was shopping online at Old Navy for other things (I need longer sweatpants—the ones I’ve been wearing are capri-length, and my full-length ones are too small), and saw a bunch of new arrivals that looked really good to me AND they were on sale. I bought this outfit:

(image from OldNavy.com)

The reviews for the pants were so good! And you can’t tell from that little picture, but they’re a cool classy autumnal plaid:

(image from OldNavy.com)

After I placed the order, I realized that several of the reviews had been from teachers saying these were such good teaching pants. I further realized that on my frame, the pants were not going to look coolly slouchy and elegant like they did on the model, and in fact I was probably going to look like a teacher, and that that would not be the right look for the restaurant. But I figured they’d be good for whatever my next job would be. Maybe I will be a substitute teacher, or a receptionist, and they will be perfect for that! Also, I look cute in polo shirts and keyhole necklines, so at least I’d have the shirt to wear with something else if the pants didn’t work out. And the shirt was available in Tall, so I would not have to accidentally peep my midriff like the poor model!

Then I ordered this bell-sleeved lace cardigan, figuring it would be good for dressying up some of my less-dressy clothes; maybe it would work with the pants, or with one of my skirts, or I could wear it over one of my frumpy shapeless dresses to give it some shape/style:

(image from OldNavy.com)

And oh! This shirt/blouse would be perfect with the two skirts I have that don’t go with anything, and maybe also with the pants if the polo doesn’t work out! I bought it in two colors, wine and black:

(image from OldNavy.com)

While I was at it, I got another pair of jeans, because I hate all my jeans, and these look like the ones I used to have that I didn’t hate as much, and so I wore them until they unfortunately wore out:

(image from OldNavy.com)

I was really excited about this order! And it was a disaster. I tried on everything tonight, and it was the kind of try-on session where you go into it thinking “It’s about whether the clothes work for my body, not the other way around!,” and you come out of it thinking “Sure, for other people, but in this case the problem is clearly my body. And also my haircut, my glasses, and my posture.”

The elegant slouchy plaid pants were shapeless, bunchy, unflattering, and several inches too long. They felt too big, but not in a way that ordering a size smaller would fix.

The polo—I don’t know how even a size 2 model made that look anything less than frumpy. I even tried it on a second time, thinking it COULDN’T have been that bad, but it was. I looked like those photos of moms in the ’70s smoking cigarettes and having bad haircuts and being depressed.

The lace cardigan was frumpy and also was not a cardigan (it didn’t claim to be one; I’d inadvertently assumed it opened up the front); and I didn’t look at the fabric content but it was astonishingly HOT: I thought I was having a stress hot-flash, but no, it was the cardigan. (I looked it up just now: 97% polyester, 3% spandex.)

The ruffle-neck blouses made me look like my grandmother on her frumpiest day. I could not believe how badly they fit and how they emphasized everything I would want to de-emphasize, while fully failing to emphasize anything I have going for me.

And the jeans were no worse than any of the other jeans I already have and don’t like, except that the pockets were like three inches deep. ALL PANTS POCKETS must be deep enough for a PHONE, and that is the RULE.

And then, just to add to the disaster, the boring comfy sweatpants I bought for walking (not pictured, because they were too boring), which DO NOT HAVE TO LOOK FASHIONABLE, also looked frumpy and baggy and made me feel bad. I do not CARE what I look like on my walks!! But these sweatpants looked bad enough that they MADE me care. They might have just been too big, but TOO LATE, THEY ARE PART OF THE FAILURE.

Oh, I should recommend the capri-length sweatpants I’ve been wearing, because I DO feel cute in those, AND I have just noticed they come in a full-length version, so I’m going to order those and return the Old Navy ones.

(image from Amazon.com)

I bought these when I was going to physical therapy for my knee and wanted something to wear that was not pajama bottoms (though I also did feel free to wear pajama bottoms). When I wear them now for my morning walks, I feel cute and sporty. And they have pockets that can hold a phone—not generously, but the phone does not fall out. They have a working drawstring; I have tied a knot on each end, because otherwise one or the other disappears within the drawstring tunnel. For sizing: I am currently wearing an 18/20 (non-W) in jeans and I have these in an XXL and they are at the upper limit of perfect: not baggy or roomy at all, but the snugness looks right for workout apparel; I bought them when I was wearing more like a 16 and they were also perfect at that size but, as you’d imagine, a somewhat less-fitted perfect fit.

Talking about these cute capri sweatpants is making me feel a little better. THEY look cute on me! Maybe I will also find restaurant clothes that look cute on me.

But on the other hand, when I needed a dress for one of Paul’s work events a few years ago, I went shopping with a fashionable friend and we went to like eight different stores and I tried on like 50 dresses and dressy outfits, and only one was even remotely okay, and now it’s too small, and also in my memory I looked silly. So. I mean, that’s why I tried pants this time! And a blouse for the skirts I have that are okay! But FAILURE, FAILURE, FAILURE! I look terrible in all clothes!!!

Perhaps I will wear the cute capri sweatpants. Oh! I can wear them with my unexpectedly-flattering champagne-sequined tank-top!

It has continued to feel odd, and I have continued to feel resentful about, going to a library not my own. It’s a smaller library, but it’s a member of the same grouping of libraries that shares materials, so I can still access anything in the same system. It’s been odd to need to drive to a library to pick up my holds, instead of just picking them up on my way out at the end of my shift. The new library doesn’t feel like Mine at all, but it is starting to feel like, for example, my third-favorite grocery store: I’m getting to know where things are, and there are a few small things that are an advantage over the favorite. The library workers are nice enough, but after a few attempts to start up those slight relationships, I’ve been using the self-checkout instead. It was too weird and cringe to deal with someone doing what used to be my job.

ANYWAY. I should have been keeping track, because I have been having parallel reading streaks of HUGE SUCCESS and ABSOLUTE FAILURE, one after another in both streaks, and always too many books in the piles. I’m trying to remember what I’ve recently checked out and returned, but there have been like EIGHT where I gave it a good 30-50 pages and then gave up; and a couple more where I read a page or two and thought NOPE.

Oh! I tried one that so many people have recommended, and I have forgotten the title and author, but it involves two young attractive and charming gentlemen, and an alternate universe including bureaucratic magic, and a delightful and heart-warming enemies-to-lovers trope. But WAY too early in the narrative I got to a point where one of the charming gentlemen referred idly and casually and non-plot-essentially to, forgive me for making you read this, his c*ck twitching, and I fully noped out at that exact moment. Just no thank you to all of that.

I tried a “summer read” by a local author, much lauded and also thrillingly chosen by one of the celebrities who has a book club, and I don’t remember why I almost immediately rejected it, but I almost immediately rejected it. Then I repented of my haste, took it back out of the return pile, and tried it again, REALLY TRIED, several dozen additional pages. Still no. How nice to get it briskly to the next person on the LENGTHY hold list!

There were two non-fiction books, one about laundry and one about being a daughter—both of which appealed to me, and neither of which I could get through, or even into. I tried skipping and skimming ahead to the good parts and that still didn’t help.

I tried Kitchen Confidential, after seeing so many positive reviews about the author’s heartbreaking story and how wonderful a person he was, and I could not get into it, and in fact felt increasing rage at his stories of how cool it was that the mostly-male kitchen staff got to drink and do drugs and have sex with every “waitress” and many of the (female) customers, and how much he wanted to be part of that world, and how he achieved it—peppered with his Best Chuckling Anecdotes about, for example, how the whole staff saw a literal bride on her wedding day having sex with the head chef out behind the restaurant, describing the bride as “bent obligingly over a trash can” or whatever it was (I returned the book before recording the exact quote, so that is from unwanted memory), and how THAT was the moment he thought I WANT TO BE A CHEF—no thank you and gross, and I don’t even want to know how many times he’s told that story, or what sort of reaction he thought it should get.

In book successes, I am on the final book of a trilogy, each book of which is the thickness of a loaf of bread and the weight of a bag of flour: it’s the Fitz and the Fool trilogy by Robin Hobb. And I DEEPLY NEEDED the MULTIPLE SWOONINGLY FERVENT recommendations I had seen for this series, because the first 100 or so pages of the first book were ROUGH. All “and, half-dressed in my leather deerskin trousers and with loose white blousen unbuttoned, I strode to collect my sword and paellis, feeling The Swift upon me, as in days of old, for I was one of the Spox’eni and could hear the ancient stones, and…” and whatever. Good lord. Insufferable. Just tell us what’s happening, and do it normal. Look at the cover:

Does this look like a book your Swistle would enjoy?

But I persevered, and if I remember correctly it was right around the hundred-page mark that I found a plotline that seized my attention. And then Edward had his surgery, and I was keeping him company in the hospital for days, with hours and hours of time on my hands for reading, and it was good to have a plentiful supply of material. There were still FAR too many sentences that started with “For,” and FAR too much maudlin wallowing. The main guy has some significant mistakes and losses, and let’s say you would be willing (even EAGER) to hear him regret and rue those mistakes/losses for, say, X times; the book has him regretting and ruing 20X times, so that you will be skimming and thinking “My good sir, WE KNOW, could we GET ON WITH IT”—and, after awhile, it will be so many repetitions that you will stop looking at the character and start looking incredulously at the author. And also: in general we dwell too much on This Guy and his perspective and experiences, and on his imprecisely-intimate special friend (a lot of tell-don’t-show with that) and that special friend’s health and trauma, when the real interesting character to me was the one who grabbed my interest at around 100 pages in. Here I am, though, looking forward to the third cement block of the series, so.

MEANWHILE: waiting for the third book to be delivered to me from another library in the system, I saw a mention online of the book Spindle’s End, by Robin McKinley.

(image from Amazon.com)

The mention included an excerpt (a photo of the first page), and I read it, and I was grabbed. I was surprised, when I requested it through the library, to see it was categorized as YA. I would like to like YA, but I have given it many tries and I almost never like it. I did like this book, and I didn’t see any reason why it would be categorized as YA. Okay, it involves an Ordinary Youth finding out that they are in fact Very Very Exceptionally Special; there were also some parts where something was obvious, and it was for some reason not obvious to the characters involved, and it kept being Not Obvious to them LONG past the point of credulity. But none of that is exclusive to YA! In fact all those things happen in the Fitz and the Fool trilogy I was just talking about, especially the part where something Obvious keeps being Not Obvious to the characters, to the point where I wondered if the author were concussed! (…I realize I am not selling the series here, so you will have to trust that no one reads three books of 800+ pages each unless they like them very much.)

Anyway, I found Spindle’s End enchanting. It’s a retelling of a fairy tale (Sleeping Beauty), and that is a category of book I am so sick of, but I’d loved the excerpt I read, so I tried it anyway, and I’m so glad I did. There were some satisfying resolutions (and initiations) of plot issues that left me WEEPING. I will read more by this author. Well, I will read more by this author when I am finished with the third book of this other trilogy, which will be in weeks and weeks. Could an editor have simply carved away SOME of the…?

While waiting for Micaiah Johnson’s new book The Unhaunting, I read her book Those Beyond the Wall and really liked it.

(image from Amazon.com)

Dystopian, violent, but relationship-based. If you liked The Space Between Worlds: this is a stand-alone, but it takes place in the same time/world, with some of the same characters. I found it less mind-blowing than The Space Between Worlds, but that’s often true of the second book in the same world. Do you like enemies-to-lovers? So does this author, but nobody’s anything TWITCHES.

Like EIGHT YEARS AGO I read and enjoyed Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. On a recent library trip I saw his new book called Vigil, and I liked the description (another afterlifey plotline) and checked it out.

(image from Amazon.com)

I did not SOB as I did while reading Lincoln in the Bardo, but I liked it a lot. It is very Of The Moment, if you can tolerate books that are Of The Moment. A spirit is on a mission to comfort the dying, and she is paired with a dying oil baron, and she finds the task…challenging. There are many paragraphs of him justifying the terrible things he has done to the world by his actions and, even more so, by his marketing spin, convincing others that climate change is nothing to worry about. …I’m talking you out of reading it. It is MORE focused, I would say, on the spirit, and on the intrusive thoughts she has of her own life, while she is trying to be spiritual and otherworldly. Well, no, it is more focused on the way someone who has sold his soul for money and power KNOWS he has done wrong AND ALSO justifies that wrong—and HOW he justifies it, and how ugly that justification is. It was satisfying to read, while also making me angry-cry.

SO MANY PEOPLE recommended The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion series, it’s amazing I could even try one—but the buzz got to me, and I tried one. In fact: the waiting list in my library system was so long, I BOUGHT the first one, IN HARDCOVER, so that I could donate it to the library system after I finished it, since they obviously needed more copies.

(image from Amazon.com)

I thought it was lightweight and silly, and that the plot/characters were ridiculous to the point of being annoying/nonsensical. I donated it to the library with no feelings of wanting to keep it. Then I kept thinking about it. Then I put the second one on hold and, after a few weeks of waiting, BOUGHT THAT ONE TOO, and read it, and donated it to the library as well. The hold lists for the third and fourth volumes were much shorter, and since I’d put myself on hold for those at the same time as I tried to reserve the second volume, I got them not too much after I was ready for them. Now I am on hold for volumes five and six.

It IS a silly story. The plotlines ARE ridiculous. But it is also sweet and funny, and I enjoy the unabashed selection of stereotypical love interests: there is the serious young fiery minister, the handsome scoundrel, the terrible tormenting boy from her youth who grew up to be hot and nice and rich, the brooding artistic tenant, the literal handsome duke, and so on. Just love interests as far as the eye can see, and how fun for us all. I don’t think I will want to watch the inevitable TV series, though: the main character is just a little too quirky and messy-haired and whoops-did-I-say-that-out-loud, and I don’t want to see that in motion.

Did you know, if you have a lot of cats who share litter boxes, and you need to bring in a sample from the litter box for the vet, and you’d really like that sample to be from The Specific Cat in Question, you can FEED YOUR CATS CRAYON SHAVINGS so that you can tell whose litter box sample is whose?? What a world. What a world.

In related news, I have spent time today whittling curls of four different, brightly-colored crayons into bowls, and mixing the shavings with highly-enticing CANNED FOOD, because I need a sample from ANOTHER possibly-ill cat.

To review. We have FOUR cats. Two are ORANGE and OLD. The other two are BLACK and YOUNG. One of the two young black cats is being treated for what is probably FIP (Feline Infectious Peritonitis, which until recently was 100% fatal, but now there is a Very Expensive Prescription that usually cures it). He SEEMS to be recovering beautifully, but his kidney-size and his bloodwork tell a different story, and the vet has warned us that the kidneys and the bloodwork “don’t paint a rosy picture.” It is not unlikely that we will finish his course of FIP medication, which cost many hundreds of dollars but who can put a price on a life (I can and will, when it is a housecat), and when the medication is over, he will die. We have been adjusting to this. We thought he was going to die in August while we were on our road trip, and that the kids would have to oversee the euthanasia, so we are glad for the extra time, and glad for the vet keeping us aware that the improvement may be an illusion. Not, perhaps, quite so glad to spend so much money and THEN have him die ANYWAY, but all of life is a gamble etc.

Now the OTHER young black cat is having symptoms, intestinal. The FIP cat’s situation made me skittish, so I brought the second cat in when maybe otherwise I wouldn’t have. A just-in-case ultrasound revealed thickening in the intestine (interestingly, it’s in the ileum, which is the same place Edward’s Crohn’s disease manifested) and swollen intestinal lymph nodes, which can be several things, including IBD and cancer. The just-in-case bloodwork was ALL beautiful, except for elevated levels of calcium; the vet says that can be from LOTS of things—almost all of which were ruled out by the bloodwork and ultrasound, leaving, well, cancer.

The first young cat, the one with FIP, is skittish and beautiful and flouncy and has never really gotten to know us. He is more of a character actor in our household—“mostly decorative,” in the words of one of my friends. We refer to him affectionately as a prissy little bitch. We love him and would of course be very sad if he had to be put down, but we would not be devastated; it would be A Very Sad Thing, but very sad things happen.

The second young cat, the one who might have cancer, is another story. I got him as a four-month-old kitten, and it was a “HE chose ME” shelter story, where I went in for one cat and came out with him instead. He is more like a dog, in that he is HIGHLY interactive with us, and he follows us, especially me; and he learns and knows our routines and likes them to be followed correctly, and he is upset when there are derivations from the norm. He’s very verbal, and has many vocalizations including greeting, complaining, grousing, inquiring, demanding, yelling, calling, etc. He arrives to say hello after my alarm goes off in the morning, and he walks ahead of me up the stairs to bed at night, and in between he follows me from room to room and sits somewhere near me. We call him The Baby. I am able to turn my mind to the idea that he will die someday, perhaps a dozen years from now; I am not really able to turn my mind to the idea that he might die soon.

The vet says it’s too early to call it. It could still be, maybe, some sort of unlikely parasite that hasn’t shown up in any of the samples we’ve had done; we can try another sample, one we KNOW is from him (usually they just assume any sample from the litter box represents all the cats, because parasites are so contagious) and also a de-wormer just in case. It could still be, maybe, a food sensitivity? It could still be, maybe—well, frankly to me it sounds like the vet is reaching. In the meantime we are trying an expensive prescription high-fiber food. Each time I tap my credit card, I am reminded of one of my friends, who is retired and has enough to live on, but who works ten hours a week for “Dog Money.”

I learned something new on NPR, and it is that “diesel” and “heating oil” are THE SAME THING. Our house is heated with heating oil. That means that when the news talks about diesel prices more than doubling since February, they mean our HEATING OIL prices have more than doubled since February. AND OUR HEATING OIL PRICES WERE PLENTY HIGH IN FEBRUARY

Meanwhile our electric bill has been going up and up, even with our usage staying steady (or even decreasing, with fewer people here), and we just got the one for the month of peak a/c use, making me think THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE. And we are not profligate with the a/c! That’s been easier since I got into perimenopause and my internal thermostat broke, making me QUITE CHILLY if I sit still for awhile. And we have a lot of fans to move the air around to make it feel cooler, and on cool nights we put fans in the windows to bring that cooler air into the house, and so on. But still, the price of the electricity (and, more irritatingly, of the delivery) has gone up.

I called a household meeting. Present: Paul, me, William, cats. All humans were on board with the idea that Saving Money and Saving Energy were both worthy goals. We made a list of things we can do and/or increase this winter to reduce our energy usage/costs (many of these things we do already, but we can do some of them SIGNIFICANTLY MORE INTENSELY):

1. Electric throw blankets / heating pads set up in our usual sitting places. This will increase the electric bill, but by using more localized heat we’re hoping to bring the heating oil bill down much more than that.

2. Electric blankets or wool blankets on the beds. My brother’s family uses wool blankets on the beds, and when I slept over I was astonished by how they FEEL as if they are GENERATING heat. I was so cozy! We do have cats who sometimes barf on bedding—but washability is an issue with electric blankets, too. Paul has a carpet/upholstery-cleaner that he says he is pretty sure he can use to spot-clean a wool/electric blanket.

3. Sweaters and wool socks and thermal underwear and fingerless gloves. Maybe cute slouchy fashionable hats that don’t look weird indoors? We have an L.L. Bean credit card (it’s the one we like for college kids, because it breaks down all charges into WHO MADE each charge), and with the kids on it now we’re gradually accumulating more store credit than we know what to do with.

4. Turn down heat to unused rooms / close off unused rooms —being careful about pipes.

5. Space heater for Paul’s office. That room is two rooms away from the rest of the house, so we can close off those two rooms and he can use a space heater (and electric throw blanket, if needed) on the days he works from home. He already has a heated keyboard pad (I should note that the first one broke after just a couple of months, but the company sent a replacement for free; the second one lasted over a year so I just bought a replacement; the third one has lasted over three years so far). I made a note to get a space heater with an automatic shut-off, because Paul is not good at turning things off (or closing drawers, while we’re here), but probably they all have that. Even our electric throw blankets have auto-shut-off.

6. Sunny-window curtains OPEN during the day; nice thick curtains CLOSED when it’s dark, to help insulate windows.

7. We have a propane fireplace that is not working well (LOUD FAN or, worse, no fan) so we haven’t been using it. I don’t know what propane prices are like right now, but we could get that fireplace fixed. It’s in the living room, so that would help in the evenings.

8. Reinstall the curtain system the previous owners used: there are holders across some of the doorways that look like they held curtain rods. Paul is pretty sure he saw one of those curtain rods up in the barn. We could curtain in, for example, the living room, which has the propane fireplace in it, and keep that room pretty cozy in the evenings, while letting the rest of the house be colder.

9. This is maybe a little silly to include on the list—but we have a treadmill and an exercise bike, and I have used those for a few minutes when chilly as a way to warm up.

Paul is also going to look again into homeowner solar panel systems, starting with something that would be easy to get going immediately, without very many decisions, if such a thing exists; we both do better with new things if we start small and then can level up once we better understand what the options are.

Hey, are you freaking out about energy costs too? Do you have more ideas to throw into the pot for all of us to pick from?

On the 8-hour drive back to campus, I had Edward go through his classes and tell me about each one. He said he was saving the best for last. I was not expecting the best, in the first semester of his senior year, to be “Intro to Music.”

It sounds like a perfect example of IT’S THE PROFESSOR—although also Edward IS interested in music, and he can tell immediately if a song is…I don’t know how anyone knows this, so I am not sure I am thinking of reasonable examples, but like, if a song is in 3-4 time or 5-9 time or a waltz or whatever. You musical people will know what I’m talking about, even though I don’t.

And the professor is working with pop music, so this is something I can potentially connect to. Edward mentioned that the professor began with an analysis of “Behind These Hazel Eyes” by Kelly Clarkson, and I was immediately ALL IN. This is a song I initially heard in a MALL, and I heard the high note and thought “I MUST KNOW WHAT THIS IS.” And then I heard it more closely and was annoyed by the whole “hazel eyes” thing (please) and the “you won’t see me cry” thing—but also, my god, that high note. THAT HIGH NOTE. It’s basically O Night Divine in terms of emotional impact. Edward and I listened to it with appropriate devotion. Then I suggested we listen to “Already Gone,” also by Kelly Clarkson, and he was clasping his hands to the sides of his face and saying WHOAAAAAAAAAA in a very gratifying way.

We started listening to other example songs, any songs either of us could think of that might be interesting, and Edward would break them down based on what he’s learned in class so far, and it was very fun. Somehow from this we got on the topic of Concept Albums—like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” or, I don’t know, there are lots of others I guess. This turned out to be a callback topic, because earlier we had been talking about relationships, and I’d mentioned that I’d had three serious relationships (all three led to engagements; two led to marriage) and zero non-serious relationships; and then I amended that to say actually I’d had a few weird little not-quite-relationships, such as one where I ACCIDENTALLY started dating someone, due to a misunderstanding, and then had to extricate myself.

Well. That same Misunderstanding Relationship involved a concept album, so there was an unexpected tie-in. But…what was the concept album? Listen, I am getting old. But even so, I was surprised I could come up with ALMOST NOTHING, considering what a relatively big deal this album had been, and how many times I’d listened to it. Here was what I had:

The guy in question and I were driving to the beach at night—his idea, he thought I should see it. I was in late high school or else very early college home on break—but more likely late high school. He put on an album he thought I should hear, and we listened to it in the dark on the way to the beach and again on the way home, and I was fairly blown away by it, as one might be when listening to any new album in the dark in a car on the way to/from the beach in late high school, but especially a concept album. He then gave me my own copy of the album (A CASSETTE) for Christmas. Could I say more about the album? No it turns out I could not.

But Edward has a friend who has a knack for such things, so he was texting her immediately and then the two of them were asking me questions. WHEN was I in late high school / early college? Was it a CASSETTE, definitely a cassette? Yes. Could I remember anything about the band? boy singers or girls? Boys. Maybe one boy, maybe multiple boys, but I didn’t remember any girls. Could I remember anything about the album cover? I had a VIBE of it being black and white, but couldn’t say if that was accurate. Was it The Cure? Oh honey no, UTTERLY wrong vibe, The Cure was early college for me (I was delayed, due to The Christianity), and also this was more like…hair-band power ballads? or Scorpions? I said this to my two detectives who are currently in their very early 20s. What do they know of hair bands or power ballads or Scorpions? And why could I not remember ANYTHING ELSE about this album, not a single song, not a single plot element? Is it time for disease-progress-stunting medication?

Fifty guesses later, I was despairing. If they were guessing The Dead Kennedys, which they were, there was NO HOPE. It was not QUIRKY, it was SERIOUS. Edward said no, there was still hope, don’t give up. He texted his friend clues such as “No, he LIKED-HER-liked-her,” and “It could have been from BEFORE those years: we don’t know it was new when she heard it.” He pulled up a Wikipedia article about concept albums, and he and his friend started checking for (1) boy singers and (2) black-and-white covers and (3) SERIOUS NOT QUIRKY. He read out one name after another and I said no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is hopeless can we give up, no, no, no, no, wait wait what was that one you just said, wait what was the album name, hey play a little bit of that one, OH MY GOD I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU FOUND IT

Do you want to guess? Are you from the time of hair band power ballads and do you have a guess? I will put a space here in case you want to think about it and/or guess.

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It was “Operation: Mindcrime” by Queensrÿche—and I DID already know how to make an umlaut, but I don’t think I have ever made one over a Y before, and IS that legit or no? ALSO you CANNOT FULLY APPRECIATE how ardently I am hoping that AT LEAST ONE of you will say OH YES OPERATION MINDCRIME. Because it seems much more likely that what I am looking at right now is a sea of blank stares—considering how I did not remember ANYTHING about the album, or remember hearing ANYTHING about it in the thirtyish years between then and now. …Though as soon as I heard the album title, I could IMMEDIATELY sing the tune for the words “Operation MINDcriiiiiiiiime!”—with the little power-ballad teeth-baring scream!

I was going to write about the difference between me-in-college and my-kids-in-college, politically-speaking, but I got two paragraphs into it and I was starting to wonder if I could have another cup of coffee. They are MORE politically engaged and active, that’s the entire upshot.

My sunburn is peeling and I am trying not to pick at it.

William is in his third week as a new teacher, and the despair has hit. He is saying things like “We’re teaching NOTHING, to PEOPLE WHO DON’T WANT TO LEARN IT, and we’re not even doing it IN A WAY THAT MAKES SENSE!” This is not causing me to panic: it is my understanding that most new teachers hit this point, and that the first year of teaching tends to be rough no matter what. Or maybe this won’t end up being his thing, and he will find something else. But in any case, we have at least temporarily stopped the résumé gap, and he has a salary and benefits, and there is a lot to be glad about there, even if it comes with the cost of disillusionment with the educational system.

Rob, who lost his job awhile back, is now losing his roommate. I am not worrying about it. This is not my problem to solve. This is not my problem to solve. This is not my problem to solve. He can always come back and live in his room, so he will not starve on the streets; and other than that, this is not my problem to solve. I can go la la la la la and keep my eyes on my own life.

Paul’s wrist is healing. He had a post-surgical follow-up at two weeks, and for some reason he thought that was going to be the end of it? I did one volley of argument and then dropped it (one symptom of perimenopause is that I am both MORE and LESS inclined to argue with a man who doesn’t know what he’s talking about and isn’t listening to me), and sure enough: at the two-week mark he got the cast removed, but now he’s in a splint for four weeks, and still is not allowed to drive. At the end of this stage, he will be evaluated and x-rayed again to see if he needs more time in the splint or if he can start physical therapy.

Edward saw his doctors for the first time since the surgery a month ago, and I was so excited to hear what they had to say—but they were mostly asking HIM questions, and said it was too soon for them to be able to say anything about how things had gone. They do bloodwork each time, so everyone is interested to see how THIS batch compares to the NEXT batch in 5-6 more weeks. We are also hoping to see weight gain, but it is too soon to expect it.

You may remember me freaking out because the surgery was only two weeks before the beginning of the new semester; but it turned out we followed the one ever-narrowing branching path that led to Everything Being Fine: he went back to school, and it has not been a problem (other than the part where Elizabeth and I had to move all of his stuff because he wasn’t allowed to lift anything). The school year is going well, and he says he’s feeling good. He’s having some mild GI symptoms that the doctors think are most likely because of the surgical disruption and the healing process, as opposed to being symptoms of ongoing Crohn’s issues.

OH. I remember the follow-up I was going to be sure to give. Do you remember when my friend Linnea unexpectedly brought her HUSBAND (who is NOT a friend of mine) to our coffee date?? I may be misremembering / making this up, but I feel like among the many, many fun and interesting comments, a sort of consensus started to build that a lot would hinge on the NEXT coffee date: like, was this a weird one-time thing and I may never find out why she brought him? or is this THE NEW NORMAL AND I SHOULD HAVE SET A BOUNDARY IMMEDIATELY.

Linnea and I were both busy for quite a few weeks in a row, so it took awhile to get to test this. Finally we made a coffee date for last week. We texted back and forth several times about logistics. Only when we got to the “Okay, I’m leaving my house in two minutes” stage did she say “Oh, and Kent might stop by if that’s okay.” First of all: WHAT!!!! Second: that is not a REAL “if that’s okay,” because there is no way to say it isn’t. A REAL “if that’s okay” would happen earlier in the plans and would be something like “I was thinking of seeing if Kent would like to join us, if that’s something you’d like too?” Third: What does “stop by” mean?

It turned out that “stop by” meant he was there from beginning to end. Again, it was not UNPLEASANT, per se. He’s a fine guy. I’m not looking to be friends with him (I’ve got chatty know-it-all guy at home), but it’s not like I actively dislike him. He’s a charming guy and he knows it, which is not my cup of tea. BUT WHY WAS HE THERE AT ALL.

Also, OMG ALSO: HE WAS TRYING TO GET ME TO GO OUT FOR BEERS WITH HIM AND HIS FRIENDS. Like, WITHOUT LINNEA. SOCIALIZING WITH HIM SEPARATELY. WHY. WHY. WHY. WHY. WHY. WHY. NO.

Fortunately, though I can be POOR at speaking up when I don’t like something, I managed early on to choose the correct social mode for dealing with this guy, which is to be frank and opinionated and not particularly careful of his feelings. Like, he invited me to come over and play board/card games at a game night he hosts, and I said “Oh! No. I do not like games.” And when he said oh come on, I have some you WILL like, I said “Nope! Absolutely not. Thanks tho!” And when he said if I didn’t like group games he had some good two-player games, I said “Even worse!” However: I think this might be one of the reasons he’s being so persistent. I suspect he is not accustomed to hearing No. I suspect it is about 99% of the appeal I seem to inexplicably hold for him. Meanwhile Linnea is just sitting there, sort of chuckling, occasionally saying “Honey. She said she doesn’t like games.” WHAT IS GOING ON HERE.

I had a long interesting discussion with Edward in the car, driving him back to school after the recent doctor appointment. He’s of the mind that it IS okay to respond to a fake “if that’s okay” with a real “It’s not!” And I do agree it’s okay, or should be okay, but it’s not within my social abilities so it’s irrelevant. What IS within my abilities is to HEAD IT OFF AT THE PASS. I can, for example, invite Linnea for coffee, and add “Just us this time, so we can talk about menopause *laughing emoji*.” And at that coffee date, it is within my abilities to say cheerfully, “I have never had a friend bring her husband along to a coffee date before. What’s up with that?” Because I know I shouldn’t need to know the Why in order to put a stop to the behavior, but I feel as if the Why is important for my decision-making process and for the way in which I would put a stop to the behavior.

Another question is whether I would continue the friendship if this is a buy-one-get-one-free situation. The friendship is not serious enough that it would cause drama or heartbreak to let it fade away. On the other hand, I can’t say I had a bad time hanging out with both of them. The MAIN reason I wouldn’t want to continue it is that he’s PUSHY and I don’t want to have to keep saying no to all the social opportunities he’s offering me—though, well, I also don’t hate it as a sort of running joke, as long as it continues to be a running joke and not Actual Pressure. But I don’t like to have to carefully strategize a friendship. It makes me think of Frances the storybook badger: “Do you want to be careful, or do you want to be friends?”

I had such an unexpected day today: I went to a BEACH and sat in the SUN. I went with two beach-experienced friends who coached me through the process, and I learned a lot; I took literal notes on a literal notepad. I applied sunscreen once before we left, and reapplied twice more while we were there, and STILL I would describe patches of my current skin color as fuschia, if I could spell fushcia, which spell-check assures me I cannot.

I put SPF 60 on my face/neck/eartops, and I wore a hat and sunglasses, and those regions seem fine so far. I started with SPF 50 on my shoulders/arms/chest/legs, and then re-upped with SPF 30 (the SPF 50 was a pump-bottle and I didn’t want to put it in my beach bag); my legs and lower arms are just faintly pink, but my chest and shoulders and upper arms are bright. I wonder if that bottle of SPF 50 might have been expired, or maybe the SPF 30 bottle was expired. Or maybe I am half-Dutch and an Indoors Type and never wear sleeveless or low-cut anything, and my never-public areas of skin would have been absolutely shocked by this experience no matter what. I had half an inch of cleavage showing today! CLEAVAGE!! Now it understands why I usually keep it protected!

Well! I would say the enormous defibrillator-level shot of vitamin D has nevertheless done me some extreme good. I am almost DAZED with it, or possibly it is mild sunstroke! I went home and drank a huge glass of water and a little can of pineapple juice and a regular can of diet Coke and another glass of water; and then after a couple hours I gingerly took my shirt off and used our aloe plant medicinally for the first time since purchasing it years ago, and put a nice layer of aloe all over the hot-pink areas. I let it dry (it smells a little…oniony? I did not expect that) while I CLEANED A BATHROOM (I am telling you: I am HIGH ON SUNSHINE), then washed my hands several times, then added a layer of Eucerin over the aloe. Now I am swanning around feeling wonderful but demanding sympathy.

May I recommend making friends who will do things like this with you? Actually, I cannot recommend it like that, because I didn’t even do that: these friends made friends with me. May I recommend coincidentally running into people who will make friends with you and then do things like this with you?

Also, may YOU recommend some after-sun products? I feel like I am going to wake up tomorrow feeling a little less swanny.

Do you know, I have never rented a rental car. It is possible that it is much, much easier than I expect. But because it is unexplored, it feels mysterious and difficult (and expensive).

I am an anxious driver. I feel comfortable driving Toyotas, Subarus and, I imagine, Hondas (I have heard that Toyotas and Hondas are very similar). Can I…ask for that? Or do I have to take what I get? I have heard people complain that the car they’d reserved was not the one they got, which implies to me that (1) you CAN ask for what you want and (2) you may very well not get it. At every hotel we stayed at on our recent road trip, I asked in the Special Requests field for an extra towel (I like a separate towel for my hair), and there was never once an extra towel; this makes me think that Special Requests don’t even show up, or that “extra towel” is not something they expect to see in that field.

New/unexpected costs tend to make me Panic and Freak Out. Examples: the astonishing extra taxes on a hotel room when we stayed in a big city (the taxes alone were more than I would normally spend on a hotel room); when you order a soda at a restaurant, thinking “How much can it possibly cost?,” and it’s six United States dollars; parking garages and other paid/city parking; the way a rental truck is “$19.95/day” but then is actually hundreds of dollars because of mileage and fees. I am worried renting a car will have similar things to panic and freak out about.

And I have heard that you do NOT need to get the extra insurance, as long as you have car insurance yourself. Is that true? WHAT IF IT’S NOT TRUE AND I SAY NO AND THEN SOMETHING HAPPENS??

I imagine rental car companies are like airlines and hotel chains, in that they try to reward you for brand loyalty? And I imagine that will end up causing me stress, the way it does with airlines and hotel chains: I never seem to be able to actually USE the points/incentives, and it always seems like they’ve split up the market so that I am constantly dividing my loyalty, and I end up with a useless loyalty account for every single brand. Are some car-rental brands known to be better than others? or is it like airlines, where one person swears they will never use Delta again and they only fly United, and the next person says Delta is the only airline they will ever use and they would rather walk than fly United?

Are there things to know about saving money on rental cars? Like, is it cheaper if your rental starts on a certain day of the week, or lasts a longer/shorter number of days, or if you collect/return it to a different location? I have heard you HAVE to fill up the tank before you return it, or else they will absolutely fleece you on the refill fees. I am worried they will try to charge me for some minor damage that was already there but that I didn’t notice / didn’t think was important enough to make note of. I am not very observant.

Are there things to know about REDUCING THE HASSLE? I have heard people complain about waiting a long time to get a car. Is that just something that sometimes happens and isn’t particularly avoidable?

We have a brand-new child-financial situation to deal with: what to do, financially, about an adult child who is working full-time and living at home.

I will start by telling you what we did about children’s income when the children were still in school, because it feels relevant. A child working part-time (like during the school year) put half of their earnings into their own college fund, and kept the other half. A child working full-time (like during the summer), put 50-70% of their earnings into their own college fund and 10-30% into charity/investment (we gave them some input on those proportions, up to the 80% point, depending on their own priorities and also on what their college cost), and kept 20% for themselves. Well, I mean, almost ALL the money, except for charitable contributions, was For Themselves. But we used “for themselves” in this context to mean “money to do whatever you want with.” (If any of them had opted not to attend college, their own personal college savings accounts would have been turned over to them when they graduated high school and moved out.)

Now for the first time we have an adult child, a college graduate, who is 25 years old, has a full-time job, and lives at home. When I graduated from college, I could get a minimum-wage job at a bakery and just barely afford to live in a cheap/crummy one-bedroom apartment (two flights up; living over a business; literal shag carpeting that didn’t bear thinking about too much; a large window IN THE SHOWER; no a/c and most of the windows didn’t open / didn’t have screens; heat adjusted by the landlord; iffy hot water) with those wages. After that, any improvement in my circumstances (getting a raise; working overtime; getting a higher-paying job; getting a roommate; etc.) represented a big step up, and that was very motivating and encouraging, and felt good and right to be progressing that way through life.

That is not the time my kids live in. As I understand it, you will all understand what the rental market is like right now; but in case you live in one of the few areas where this is not the case, or in case you have not looked into it recently, I will explain that someone working full-time at a medium-low wage cannot practically afford a one-bedroom apartment, even if there were many one-bedroom apartments available, which there are not, and especially if they have significant student loans to pay back.

But I will go on to say that it seems Deeply Wrong to me to have an adult earning a full-time paycheck and getting to treat the whole thing as discretionary money, while someone else pays for their groceries, electricity, hot water, etc. It doesn’t just seem deeply wrong on a Rightness level, it also seems deeply wrong on a TRAINING/LAUNCHING level.

Even though things are harder than when I was this age, I still want to take a shot at training the idea that it’s pretty normal to start out just barely scraping by and then gradually do better over time. I don’t want the kids to start by spending a full-time wage on whatever they want, and then feeling like they take a 95% pay cut when they move out and have to pay their own normal expenses. It’s not that we want to profit off their earnings (we would not be profiting in any way off their earnings); it’s that I think it is good for them to find it normal that an adult would contribute financially to the household that they live in, and to get used to the idea right off the bat that you DON’T get to spend all of your income on fun stuff. I feel like we already made progress on this when we made them divide their earlier earnings, and I’d like to continue that progress.

But: how MUCH should an adult child contribute to the parents’ household? How much. And how to DECIDE how much.

Additionally there is the tentative, sticky feeling we have about trying to tell a grown child what they have to do with their money, when we don’t actually have jurisdiction over that anymore. Sure, we could threaten, and we could say they have to pay what we say or they have to move out, but let’s be serious. I am not going to do that.

We could try to figure out what their actual household expenses were, and make them pay that. What part of the hot water bill is theirs? What part of the grocery bill? What part of electricity? How much car insurance, how much gasoline, what percentage of car maintenance/repair if they are using a family car? What is the value of their bedroom plus access to a bathroom, kitchen, living room? That sounds exhausting, and I don’t want to. Plus, I feel like there is a difference between what a kid working at a fast-food place and needing to live at home should contribute, versus what a kid working as a doctor and preferring to live at home should contribute. This seems like a good place to add that I don’t object philosophically to the idea of a kid preferring to live at home. I’m not pining for an empty nest; and I think multi-generational living can be very practical in many ways, and may be the way of the future in this housing market.

My friend Jane says that back in 2009 when she was in a similar situation to ours, she charged her son $600/month. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $934/month today. Initially that seemed…high. I asked her how she came up with that number, and she said she thought she had looked at comparable rental costs, adjusted downward because it was living in his childhood bedroom in his mother’s house rather than in his own apartment, and then added a chunk for groceries and utilities. Well, that actually seems about right: less than $12,000/year for room/board/utilities and the use of a car. In fact, it seems affectionately low, adjusted for parental love. A kid making $24/hour, or $48,000/year, would be keeping 75% of their income. Well, let’s say 60-70% of their income, after taxes.

Elizabeth and I discussed the topic as I drove her back to school. She is a senior this year, and remarked that she would need to be careful what she suggested William should have to do, since she might be subject to those policies herself next year. We wondered about doing it more like a flat percentage, and about making it so that MORE of it went to the kid’s own benefit—as we did when we made them save for a college account that would be theirs if they didn’t go to college. What about something like this, if we were confidently in charge: they have to put 50% of their earnings after student loan payments into a savings account for their future launch (first/last month rent or down payment, furniture, etc.), and they have to put 25% of their earnings toward the household, and they keep the remaining 25% for themselves? That would be a lot more spending money that Paul and I had for our first couple of decades, but it would at least APPROXIMATE normal adult spending, AND be an actual contribution to the household, AND it would establish a Launch Account they would presumably end up being very glad for, which would teach them about how savings really add up. Does that seem like a good Training Wheels Budget for an adult child living at home? Imagine yourself at 25: does it feel like something you would accept? Well, that’s kind of hard for some of us to imagine, isn’t it. Different times.

DID you live for a time with your parents as an adult while working full-time, and what was the financial arrangement if any? Do you or did you have adult kids living at home and working, and what did you do about that financially if anything? Or do you happen to know someone else’s set-up? Do share. Different things are going to work with different families in different circumstances, so let’s build a collection of options to consider.

I should add that Elizabeth and I had splendid success with our trailer-assisted shopping mission. We went to two used furniture stores, each of which had a nice huge easy parking lot for the trailer. We found a loveseat in great condition, very comfy, $60—and the tag was the color of the day, so it was 50% off and we got it for $30. We spent more than that on an end table: $35 for a solid-wood (HEAVY) end table in great condition, with a drawer and a little cabinet and a magazine rack; as we were pointing it out to the clerk so she could put a sold tag on it, another customer good-naturedly but sincerely said he had been just about to go up and buy it, which was gratifying.

We bought three smallish dining room chairs, nice sturdy dark wooden ones with a chunky floral carving on the backs. They’d been reupholstered, and the person who reupholstered them had centered a different element of the fabric pattern on each one. It was $16 for the set of three, and when we got up to the front it turned out they were 75% off, so we got them for $4. We got them as occasional chairs—the kind of chair you just sort of scatter around wherever they’d be useful, like next to the door where you put on your shoes, and then you have extra chairs to gather up when you have people over.

We got a nice sturdy metal mesh wastebasket, and two table lamps; $4 for the wastebasket, $12-down-to-$8 for one of the lamps, $12 for the other lamp. A gallon bag of assorted office supplies: several tape dispensers, several hole-punches, several staplers, all nice and heavy—$5 for the bag.

Our mission was pretty fun, because NONE of the four roommates had brought any furniture (the one who arrived first did buy a shower curtain, a thing of dish soap, two tiny folding chairs that looked more like plant stands), so all we were trying to do was FILL ANY OF THE GAPS. We weren’t trying to buy ALL of it; and we weren’t the fourth roommate trying to fill the specific gaps left by the other three; we just had to check off SOME THINGS. Which reminds me, we also contributed a recliner: the day we were loading up the trailer at our house, our neighbor put it out on the lawn with a FREE sign and we nabbed it. So for the living room of the college apartment, we were able to contribute a loveseat, a recliner, an end table, two lamps, and up to three occasional chairs.

Then we went to a couple of non-used stores, and we bought a kitchen trash can and kitchen trash bags, a recycling bin, a bath mat, a 30-pack of toilet paper, a 6-pack of paper towels, command hooks, two hand soaps and a hand-soap refill; bread, peanut butter, jam, milk, cheese sticks, granola bars, goldfish crackers.

It feels like that shouldn’t have taken all day, but it did: we started at 9:00 and we finished just after 5:00. We did, however, take MULTIPLE restorative breaks for food and drink and sitting in the air conditioning, so that we would not lose our motivation or our mood. We had medicinal coffees and ice creams at about 3:00, right before we needed to wrestle the furniture from the college parking lot all the way into the college apartment (non-air-conditioned), and then bring her boxes (which we’d unloaded into the living room) upstairs to her room. We were quite sweaty and worn out by the end of it, but we felt triumphant.

Then I got to DROP OFF THE TRAILER, which in some ways was like the relief after giving birth. Except then the UHaul guy talked to me for almost half an hour about the AI assistant he had programmed using AI, and how AI is just a neutral tool that can be used for good or for bad, and how AI is happening whether we like it or not so there’s no point resisting it, and how anyone who is against AI should be taking into account the uses for people with disabilities. He said it all with the tone of someone making good and fresh and interesting points.

After that I went and got a giant sub sandwich and a four-pack of a spiked sparkling water I’d wanted to try, and I went to my hotel room and turned the a/c down to 65F, and I watched reruns of The Office. A great, great day.