This kind of thing can feel like a glitch in the matrix:. I have a shower radio (it’s this one, if you are in the market, and it was/is expensive but I LOVE IT and have used it for years and years now with no issues), and it has five pre-set stations. This morning I clicked on the first station, and it was just finishing up playing Jessie’s Girl, and then it went to commercials. I switched to the second station: commercials. Third station: commercials. Fourth station: commercials. Fifth station: just finishing up playing Jessie’s Girl, and then went to commercials. (It is only TODAY, right now, that I learned it is Jessie’s Girl and not Jesse’s Girl.) (It seems like it should be Jesse’s Girl.)

Yesterday we talked about colonoscopies, and I don’t think there’s any denying that over the last 17 years this blog has been slowly segueing from Parenting to Aging, because today I would like to talk about knees. I am not sure how long mine have been bothering me, but I KNOW they were bothering me in 2017, because that’s when I read that the keto diet could be helpful in reducing joint pain, and decided to try it; 10-year-old Henry had been on a “Let’s go for a walk!” kick, and I was having trouble walking with him, and that seemed like something to fix.

Anyway it’s been at least six years. I keep mentioning it at my annual physicals, and my doctor keeps saying yep, arthritis, these things happen as we get older. (I made her sound dismissive there, but she’s not immediately dismissive: she does a bunch of little tests, bending me and pinching me and saying “Does this hurt? How about this?” and so forth. And then she tells me I can try turmeric, and I can try glucosamine, and I can try icing it, and I can try five-day courses of anti-inflammatories, and I can try diclofenac gel, and I can try a knee brace, and I can try stretches/exercises, and so forth.) But LAST year she said that we COULD have me get an x-ray, just to peek, and if nothing else to get a baseline—and as I was thinking that over, she said actually she didn’t think an x-ray was necessary. THIS year I was ready, and when she said we COULD, I immediately said “YES THAT SOUNDS GREAT,” and so I got knee x-rays.

Both knees hurt, but one of them hurts more than the other: I have been doing stretches and muscles-around-the-knees exercises, and with one knee I can do them, and with the other knee I sometimes can’t. And the x-rays showed it’s the sometimes-can’t knee that looks bad; the other knee looks normal. I am a little surprised it looks normal, because it DOES HURT. Well, perhaps I am compensating for the other knee, and putting extra strain on the normal knee. In any case, one knee looks bad, so I am glad we did the x-rays: firstly, so that my doctor knows I am not just complaining; secondly, so we can see how much worse it gets over time; thirdly, so that *I* know I am not just complaining / just not getting enough exercise / etc. The situation apparently looks degenerative/age-related/wear-and-tear-related, as opposed to injury-related.

The doctor said there are Next Steps we can take, depending on how things go from here (sometimes a knee situation stays where it is, and sometimes it gets gradually worse, and sometimes it gets abruptly worse). At the very end of the timeline, an end we might never reach, is knee-replacement surgery. Between here and there are things such as a referral to an orthopedic doctor who might give me injections, or who might do a smaller surgery, or who might want to try other medications/treatments. This is a fourth reason I am glad we did the x-rays: because now I feel I can ask for the NEXT thing.

This morning I am shopping for knee braces (I am supposed to wear a knee brace), and I am wondering if anyone has one they’d recommend. I am browsing and it seems like all of them have 3 or 4 stars out of 5, with legitimate complaints: they roll down; they don’t feel like they help; the elastic loosens quickly; they need to be constantly adjusted; they’re sweaty/uncomfortable; they’re bulky and make it hard to move around.

Edited to add: Also, do you have any favorite brands of glucosamine chondroitin? (I am supposed to try glucosamine chondroitin.) (I have already tried the turmeric. The doctor said to try it for two weeks, and if it didn’t do anything, I could stop. It did not do anything noticeable.)

I have had a slightly odd thing happen recently, which I will now relate. I mentioned on Facebook (more on this in a moment) that I had been referred for my first colonoscopy. You might well wonder why I would post such a thing on Facebook (this is already the moment, we are already there); and it is because, awhile back, I saw something about how one of the main reasons people die of colon cancer is that there is so much embarrassment/reluctance about colonoscopies; and that it can make an actual difference to THE WELL-BEING OF ALL HUMANKIND if people mention colonoscopies casually, the way they might mention their annual physicals or eye exams: like, it’s not embarrassing; like, why would anyone be embarrassed; like, this is a normal thing to do, your friends and family members are all doing it, it is normal and routine and not embarrassing.

And that is a theory that makes sense to me, a person who finds colonoscopies embarrassing and not at all in the same realm as eye exams—and yet who DOES want (“want”) to have one, because that is the age I am, and because I would prefer not to die of colon cancer. Plus, Edward has had MANY colonoscopies because of his Crohn’s disease, so I am at least familiarized with the process in that way, and it helps me to see/hear how casually–even ENTHUSIASTICALLY–his GI doctor treats the whole thing. His GI doctor does not seem grossed out; his GI doctor seems like he is glad to get a look behind the scenes.

Anyway, that’s why I mentioned it on Facebook: as a service to all humankind. And here is the slightly odd thing that happened: more than one person, and to be precise it was two people, separately reached out to inform me that I would not, and/or would not HAVE TO, be having a colonoscopy but instead would be doing the little kit where you take a sample and send it in to a lab. But. In my case I had said that I HAD BEEN referred for a colonoscopy. I did not say “I am doing the little kit.” (Which I have done, previous years.) And yet people were telling me I was not going to have to do what I was telling them I was going to have to do, and that I would be doing something else instead. It was odd.

Then I went in to work the next day, and my co-worker of approximately my same age was mentioning that she was going to have her first colonoscopy, and would soon be starting her prep, and I was all “WAHOO, HIGH-FIVE, COLONOSCOPY TWINS!!!”—and our mutual co-worker, who is half a dozen years older than us, informed us that she had never had a colonoscopy, and that all we really needed to do, without a family history of colon cancer, was the little sample kit where you send it off to a lab. But…my other co-worker and I have both been ACTUALLY SCHEDULED for ACTUAL COLONOSCOPIES by our ACTUAL DOCTORS. So…why is she telling us that we can instead send a sample to a lab? It was odd. I can’t think of another medical procedure where I have had this same reaction: the “Oh: you say this is going to happen, but I can tell you with confidence–though without evidence–that it will not happen” reaction.

We have a gross mystery! This reminds me of the times I have searched/scoured the kitchen for That Terrible Smell, and it has almost always been (1) the sink disposal or (2) potatoes. Except this time it is happening not in our kitchen, but in our car.

Here are the facts:

• Wednesday afternoon, Elizabeth asked me to give her a ride home from school, and I did, and nothing seemed amiss in the car. If it is helpful: the car in question is a Toyota Camry—a 4-door sedan.

• Thursday morning, I got into the car to go to work, and there was A Terrible Smell. The smell category was “spoiled milk”/”liquefied potatoes.”

• Thursday afternoon after work, I looked around a little to see if somehow something from one of my grocery store trips (Monday and Wednesday, or the previous Wednesday) had rolled into a dark corner to commit dark deeds. In the trunk, I saw a little bit of liquid down underneath the floor, in a hard-to-reach area by the spare tire. It smelled accurate. It looked like a couple of teaspoons’ worth at most. My starting theory was that a grocery item (milk carton, half-and-half, yogurt?) had leaked a little bit, and then gone very, very bad.

• Thursday afternoon/evening, I left the trunk of the car open, to air it out / dry it up.

• Friday morning, the smell was CONSIDERABLY MORE INTENSE. I thought, “Okay, it’s only a couple of teaspoons’ worth, but surely if I CLEAN THAT UP the smell will go away more quickly.” I took the carpet layer out of the trunk to get at the spill, only to see that there was A LOT MORE LIQUID THAN PREVIOUSLY OBSERVED. Like, a pint? or more? I am not good at estimating. But it took a roll and a half of store-brand paper towels to soak it all up. Paul had to take the spare tire out so that I could get at all of it.

Did you want a description of the fluid? It was translucent and yellowish/brownish. I guess kind of like pee, except it did not really look like pee, and did not smell at all like pee. It smelled like spoiled milk.

One theory is that a grocery item (gallon of milk, quart of light cream, quart of yogurt, etc.) LEAKED. But…then surely we would have noticed a gallon of milk / quart of light cream / quart of yogurt that was MISSING A PINT OR SO OF MATERIAL.

Another theory is that an entire grocery item (potato, pint of ice cream, individual container of yogurt, etc.) was left behind in the trunk, and went bad. But no such item, or any packaging/residue of such item, was discovered during the excavation and clean-up.

Another theory is that Paul’s coffee-with-cream thermos could have leaked everywhere, without him realizing it. But: (1) this is the car I drive and (2) even if he used my car, as he sometimes does, he would not have put his thermos in the trunk.

Elizabeth wondered if perhaps the trunk lid has a leak, and rainwater got in and then developed a bacteria or something and went very smelly. This is a possibility. But…would water go THAT BAD? And we don’t immediately see anything that looks like a hole in the car trunk.

I can’t find it on Twitter now, but someone started a thread for people to recommend VERY LONG books, and someone else responded by recommending The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox (Target link, Amazon link). I don’t think I follow any of the people involved—not that “seeing tweets by people whose tweets you want to see” has ever been Twitter’s plan or interest, but it does make it harder to re-find the tweet I’m looking for. And as it happens, I WAS glad to have seen the tweet, and I wish I could find it again because whatever they said about this book was enough for me to request it from my library system and read it without knowing any more, and so I would like to wield that tweet at you and see if it makes YOU go read the book.

(image from Target.com)

I linked to the paperbacks because Target has only the paperback available and it bothered me to link to one paperback and one hardcover; but Amazon’s hardcover price is actually less than the paperback price right now, and now that I have finished reading the book I have ordered a copy for myself in hardcover, because this book seems too thick to be manageable in paperback. If I hadn’t been so impulsive, I would have instead bought a copy from eBay. And for you, I recommend being even less impulsive than THAT and seeing if your library system has it.

I think the very best way to read it is to go into it without knowing anything about it: that’s one reason I’m recommending LIBRARY, because then you can follow that advice at no risk at all. The tweet I can’t remember used a description that was something about it being a book that “had everything” and “didn’t even seem long” and “you’ll wish it were longer,” and that seems pretty good to me as an enticement. Also, I might be making those quotes up. Those might be things I’D say about it.

I will leave a little spacer here for those of you who would like to go get the book and read it without knowing anything about it, and then I will go on to discuss a little more about it, for those of you who aren’t going to read it otherwise, and for those of you who might be looking at it as a gift idea.

I will be giving what I would consider vague, fair-game spoilers: they will be about the TYPE of book it is, with some mention of THEMES and ELEMENTS, plus things you could get by reading the book flap. I personally was glad to have read it without receiving these vague, fair-game spoilers—but if I HAD received these vague, fair-game spoilers, I would not have considered the book spoiled. It’ll be the equivalent of, like, telling you that a book is a light funny romance, when maybe you wouldn’t have guessed that from the cover because, unlike every single other light funny romance coming out right now, maybe the book in question didn’t have a sherbet-colored cover with cartoonily-drawn characters (perhaps a glasses-wearing woman who has lost one of her high-heeled shoes is being pushed in a wheelbarrow by a tousle-haired man in a business suit!) and a whimsical, children’s-book-esque title such as Fiona McFly Gets By or whatever.

La la la. We are waiting for some of us to leave. We will not be talking about anything you can’t come back and read LATER, after you have first read the book without knowing anything about it.

La la la. Just filling some space.

La la. It’s not even going to be something you’ll want to come back and read later, I don’t think, because I’m still only going to speak about it in general terms.

La la la. Loop-de-doo.

This is the KIND of book that starts out seeming like one kind of book (a book that takes place in our familiar reality, albeit with the rage-inducing murder of a main character’s sister in the very first sentence), and then after a hundred or so pages following this main character’s life and feelings and memories and family, the book abruptly makes a shift into a book with magic and other worlds and mythical beings and so forth. Like the Narnia books, kind of, where first some kids are spending their holidays with some old uncle in some old house, and then abruptly they’re in a snowy forest and there’s a talking faun. I greatly enjoyed encountering this shift with NO PRIOR WARNING: I was amazed and enchanted. But if I’d known about the shift, it would only have made me MORE likely to read the book, so.

It is a LONG book, but it did not feel long, and I wanted there to be more of it. There are parts that are easy to race right past, because you want to get to the next part of the action—and then you realize you raced right past some of the action because it was so calmly told. There is real-life peril! There is a lot of mixed religious/mythological stuff: Odin! Purgatory! Angels! Demons! Souls! Ancient scrolls! Special swords! There are underlying themes of stolen land, stolen people, bad bargains that no one fixes because it’s been so long with things the way they are. There’s some environmental stuff, and there are some brief parts about food/nutrition that made me a little eye-roll-y. There is friendship! romance! superior species / inferior species interactions! other kinds of relationships! There’s a lil bit of sex, but it’s not explicit. There are themes about secrets, and family, and revenge, and regret. There’s MAGIC! SHAPE-SHIFTING! PORTALS TO OTHER WORLDS! I had a lot of fun reading it, and would definitely want to read it again.

I am very late to this post, really TOO late for practical purposes—but I was distracted by college-selection stuff and then I was out of town (my brother and I went on a fun quick trip to see our parents), and so it is only now I have thought to say this: If you are someone who would normally think of Mother’s Day as a special day for yourself, but your family has historically been…lacking…in celebrating that day, this is your reminder to lay in some supplies.

What I personally like to do is buy some Plausible Deniability Items. Perhaps a can of Pillsbury orange rolls from the grocery store, or a nice box of pastries from the grocery store bakery! Why, we might have those ANYWAY on a Sunday! Perhaps a box of See’s chocolates—it’s not for Mother’s Day, no, it’s just that I like to collect the pretty SPRING FLOWERS TINS they normally have around May! Maybe I buy something that’s been in my online shopping cart for a long time; the early-May timing is merely a coincidence. Anything where, if the family DOES in fact take action this year, I won’t feel silly for having made these purchases I might easily have made ANYway.

If you’re like me, you might feel silly no matter what. You might feel self-indulgent, or self-pitying, or over-reactive, or like it’s Worse Than Nothing if you have to do these things for yourself. You might think, “This is ridiculous: I don’t REALLY CARE about Mother’s Day!” Well then, isn’t it nice that you didn’t buy those items with any special day in mind, but instead just happened to buy them in early/mid-May! But what I have learned is that when Mother’s Day actually arrives, I am very glad to have a few things on hand, even if ahead of time I thought it was worse than nothing.

This year I bought the full-ounce bottle of Pacifica French Lilac perfume that LAST year I bought the .33 roller size of. (It smells like if you had a lilac bush growing right outside your open window, or I guess growing right outside your shoulder.) It was on a sale, so I might have bought it anyway.

(image from Target.com)

And I finally hit the buy button on the lilac cotton sweater I’ve allowed to linger in my Amazon cart forever, despite already owning the same sweater in green and knowing I love it; I got the green one on some $15 flash sale, so for some reason was balking at spending $25. (For sizing purposes: I wear an XL Tall in Old Navy, and I like this sweater in XXL—but I do not like FITTED clothing. I like to be INSIDE a sweater.)

(image from Amazon.com)

At the grocery store today I bought a Cadbury Caramello bar and a Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar, which I might have bought anyway, as they are some of my favorites and they were on sale. I bought the tube of Pillsbury orange-iced rolls, which I might have bought anyway, as a nice treat for any Sunday morning. I bought a pot of sprouted tulip bulbs, which I DEFINITELY would have bought anyway, ever since finding out that if I then carelessly flung those tulip bulbs (after the tulips wilted) into a carelessly shoveled hole in the ground at ABSOLUTELY THE WRONG TIME OF YEAR (spring), they would COME UP AGAIN THE NEXT YEAR, LIKE FREE BONUS RERUN TULIPS.

Also: if you normally do chores of any kind on Sunday (grocery shopping, bathroom-cleaning, laundry, changing the sheets, etc.), may I suggest you plan to do those things sometime between now and the end of the day Saturday? It is very nice, on a Sunday that is just like any other Sunday, to not have any chores to do. If you normally make dinner on Sunday, plan to make a dinner you personally like best, even if (especially if) other people don’t like it as much as you do; or, spontaneously, for no particular reason, plan to order take-out from a place you like, just on a whim because you don’t feel like cooking that particular evening.

Well! Elizabeth decided on a school: she chose the art college within a university, rather than the only-art-college.

THE MOMENT AFTER WE PAID THE DEPOSIT, her whole mood changed from morose to perky. She started filling out the roommate-selection application, complaining perkily the whole time about the dumb questions. She started talking perkily about which things from her room she planned to bring to college, and which she planned to leave behind, and which she planned to use the transition as an opportunity to cull. Her voice stopped doing that about-to-cry thing. She went from looking unhappy to looking happy. She started shopping for Senior Prom.

I was very relieved, because up until that point, my main concern was her despondency about the choice: I wished we had tried harder to find a place she Really Wanted; I felt bad that she felt like she was choosing between two such imperfect options; also I felt a little irritable because I TRIED to help her find more appealing options but she kept being so meh about everything and rejecting my attempts!! Anyway, it was good to see her perk up.

Now we wait to hear from Edward’s first-choice/waitlisted college. They say they don’t have a ranked waitlist; instead, they reconsider the entire waitlisted pool again, for the remaining available slots, like a microcosm of how they consider the entire pool of applicants for the original available slots. I wish I had ANY IDEA how many waitlisted students there were, and/or what Edward’s chances are. Are we talking a 1 in 100 chance? a 1 in 1000 chance? a 1 in 2 chance? Is Edward a shoo-in as long as the expected number of students decline their acceptance, or is he a long-shot even if there are record-setting declinings?? We just don’t know. We also don’t know what the financial-aid situation will be, but it seems like it would be less for a waitlisted student than for a first-round choice.

I have had a very happy thing happen at work. I don’t know if I have complained often enough about the situation: it was weighing me down, but I didn’t have much of an urge to discuss it. The main issue was that I was making less than $10/hour in a job I love and which comes with many other benefits (almost no commute; flexible hours and easy to get time off; a pleasant and interesting working environment; I like my coworkers; I like and respect my boss, and I like the way she bosses; etc.), but also I have twins heading for college, and the McDonald’s/Target starting pay in this area is $15/$17. I didn’t see how I could continue justifying working in my current job once the twins had left for school. I was feeling pretty upset about this for many reasons, ranging from small whines to large ones, and I was not looking forward to the change from a pleasant job to a miserable one.

The only way to increase my pay while still working at the library would be to get promoted to checkout desk (a position they’ve offered me, so I knew it was an option)—but the last time I worked a customer service job, I left it thinking NEVER AGAIN. (Well, with the automatic footnote that of course I WOULD if I HAD TO.) And if I’m going to hate doing customer service for, say, $13/hour at the library, I might as well hate doing customer service for $17/hour at Target, or maybe even more than that at a pharmacy.

In the meantime, though, I’d come up with an idea: I would learn to work at the check-out desk at the library A LITTLE BIT. Customer service in small quantities is vastly different from customer service forty hours a week. And that way I could cover other people’s shifts sometimes, which would increase my take-home pay if not my hourly pay. So I did that: I told my supervisor I’d like to know how to work the checkout desk at least enough to give my co-workers their breaks, and she JUMPED on that, because SHE’S been covering their breaks and she is almost always interrupted/inconvenienced by it.

But this led to a fresh issue: I ended up getting asked to cover the desk QUITE A LOT—like, sometimes for half my shift or more. So I was falling behind in my own work and getting stressed/overwhelmed by that, and also it turned out I did not cope well with making MUCH LESS MONEY than other people who worked the checkout desk. And I didn’t like that my boss didn’t seem to be noticing any of this as a problem. And it made me even more certain that I was going to have to leave this job and get a new job.

I was experiencing some significant misery over it.

Then I had my annual performance review. I was ALL GEARED UP to say something about the situation (in fact I rehearsed it unstoppably at 3:00 a.m. most nights)—but my supervisor beat me to it. She brought it up first and said OBVIOUSLY I could NOT keep working at the checkout desk for page wages, and then she talked on the topic at some length, in a way that indicated to me that she has not only been noticing the problem but also thinking about it and working at it: she said the problem is that the library wages are in some sort of wage-table, so if page wages are increased, they also have to raise everyone else’s wages. She said she was working on an idea to bring to the director, and that I should hold tight. I went away from this meeting feeling like IF NOTHING ELSE, my respect/like for my supervisor was once again justified—which was one of the list of things bothering me before, when I thought she wasn’t noticing, and I was feeling disappointed about that.

Today the director came to me with paperwork to sign: a position-title change, and a significant wage increase. She said my supervisor said there should be no difference between a page and a checkout-desk employee in terms of pay, and that all of us should have the same job title—which means they can pay me more, without having to increase the entire wage structure. I will still MOSTLY page, since that’s what I like doing, and I will also work sometimes at the desk, which so far I am finding pleasant, and nice for job variety; other employees will MOSTLY work at the desk, since that’s what THEY like doing, but will also start doing some paging. My supervisor said, and the director agreed, that it benefits everyone to know how to do more of the tasks at the library. And now I will make $16-something/hour, so I don’t have to quit this job I love and go work at McDonald’s/Target instead. AND I can increase my hours if I feel at loose-ends (and at low-bank-account) when two more children are living elsewhere. This whole thing could not have gone better.

We are in the last few days before the College Decision Deadline of May 1st. Edward has submitted an acceptance/deposit to his second-choice school, because he is waitlisted for his first-choice school, and waitlisted students don’t find out if they’re In until after the decision deadline. All of us feel content with this situation, except for the part where we can’t really tell anyone where he’s going yet, and we might lose a multi-hundred-dollar deposit. But his second-choice school and his first-choice school have been VERY CLOSE in his personal rankings, and in fact they swapped places a few times during the decision-making process, so what I mean is that we’re all content with the idea of him going there. And he knows that if he continues to yearn for his first-choice school, he can re-apply there next year and would very likely get in, assuming his grades at his second-choice school are good. (One of the main reasons he didn’t get into his first-choice school, we believe, is that he wants to major in computer science, and our high school’s computer science teacher left because of the pandemic, and so the high school did not have computer science classes or a computer team as they usually would; the first-choice school is very selective for computer science majors, and didn’t have much to go on when evaluating Edward’s application.)

Elizabeth is still unsure. She has run into that thing many of us run into with many of life’s decisions, which is that there is NO WAY TO KNOW what would be best/right (or even what she might PREFER) on SO MANY FACTORS OF THE DECISION. Right now her essential decision is between: (1) a stand-alone art school and (2) an art school within a university. The stand-alone is about two-thirds the price of the university, after scholarships and financial aid; it is not THE name-brand art school, but [editing this part of the sentence, because the guesses are indicating to me that I gave a misleading description; it is not the one in Georgia, because Georgia is not currently a safe place for a person with a uterus to have a medical emergency; but:] it was her clear favorite of all the stand-alone art schools we visited. (She got into THE name-brand art school, but we visited it and she disliked it.) (Not to mention the COST, which was BEYOND BOGGLING.) The stand-alone has hundreds and hundreds of students; the university has thousands and thousands. The stand-alone is further away (“plane ride” distance), and in a pleasing and interesting city; the university is nicely far away (“8-hour drive” distance), but in a depressing strip-malls-and-oversized-parking-lots suburb of a city (but with several interesting cities nearbyish). The university would give her the ability to do/create a combined major, or do a minor in a non-art field; the stand-alone would not. The university would provide fellow students who were not art majors; the stand-alone would not. Those are all the issues she has mentioned that are relevant to her.

At this point, after talking with her about it for hours and hours, my feeling is that she is going to have to get to the last minute and then just PICK ONE. Both schools are great choices in their own ways, and neither one of them has ALL the things she wants, and on some issues she doesn’t even KNOW what she wants—nor does she know HOW to know. She and I are both feeling some regret that we did not successfully find a university she felt more enthusiastically about than this one—but we DID LOOK QUITE A BIT, and she just never had a “WOW!!” reaction to a university, which she knows doesn’t mean a university isn’t the right decision.

A lot of college-choice stuff is framed as if it’s a romantic movie (find The One!! and you’ll Just Know!!), and it IS that way for some people, but it wasn’t that way for me and it hasn’t been that way for Elizabeth, and that’s normal too. It’s normal not to have all the information you need to make a decision, and yet get to the point where you have to make a decision anyway; it’s normal not to find one single college that has everything you wanted; it’s normal not to know what you like until you try; it’s normal to need to switch, once you have more information.

I have two books to recommend.

The first is called The Country of Ice Cream Star, by Sandra Newman, and I will tell you that initially I struggled to make it through even the first paragraph (it’s the kind of book that starts out with nothing making sense, AND it’s in a dialect, AND the main character’s name is “Ice Cream Star,” which, no) and closed the book and thought “Nope.” And yet it has ended up a leading contender for My Favorite Book of the Year, which is a decision we take very seriously at the library where I work. Also, I ended up finding the dialect charming/delightful to the point of being TOUCHING, and I enjoyed the sudden little epiphanies of where certain words came from.

(image from Amazon.com)

And so you know I must have opened it up again at some point after originally closing it, and indeed, that is what happened: I opened it up again because it’s a post-apocalyptic type of book and I was really in the mood for one of those. I struggled through the first page or two, and then stopped and consulted William, who is majoring in linguistics along with computer science, to see what he thought about whether the dialect was racist; and he read the first page or two, and got out his laptop and went typey-typey-typey for awhile, and then he said, “Without spoiling anything…I’ll say it looks like she knows what she’s doing.” He said there was a lot of talk about the dialect being racist, but it seemed to be from people who had my first reaction: feeling it MUST BE racist, without knowing much if anything about the topic. I realize this was (1) the quick assessment (2) of a blonde white guy, so I wouldn’t call it conclusive if I were researching for anyone else’s purposes, but it was enough to let ME keep reading, at least for the time being.

I don’t know how to explain the book to you. Can you maybe get it from your library so you can just TRY IT without it mattering if you don’t like it? Because I’m worried that anything I say about it will talk you OUT of it. For starters: it takes place after a pandemic that killed almost everyone, and continues to kill people before they reach full adulthood. You know me as someone who cannot tolerate Child In Danger stuff, and all of these children are in danger, and there is, well, there is a lot of dying in this book. And yet.

And as I mentioned, it’s in a dialect, William said it looked like it was a creole, and I am not generally interested in wrestling with that. So this is a book that, if YOU had described it to ME, I don’t think I would have read it! And yet! I loved it so much! I just loved it so much!

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the second book I want to recommend, which is also a contender for My Favorite Book of the Year, and which also is a book that if you described it to me I don’t think I would want to read it:

(image from Target.com)

We All Want Impossible Things, by Catherine Newman (Target link; Amazon link). I pre-ordered this not once but twice, by accident. I ordered it (twice) because Catherine Newman is on my very short list of authors whose books I will always pre-order.

But maybe you’re noticing this was published in November of last year and I’m only mentioning it now. Well. The thing is. It’s about a woman whose best friend dies in hospice of cancer. And each time I looked at my To Read pile, I thought “I’m not up to that right now.” And then I finally depleted my To Read pile to the point where I thought “OKAY LET’S DO THIS.”

And I loved the book so much, I want to tell everyone I know to PLEASE PLEASE READ IT, because YES, YES, it is about a woman’s best friend dying in hospice, and YES it is so so sad, you are NOT WRONG to think you will cry numerous times—but it is ALSO such a funny and delightful book, much funnier and much more delightful than you would expect considering the subject matter. And I think it wonderfully demonstrates many of the things I love about having teenagers. And if you are already a fan of Catherine Newman and her Ben & Birdy blog from long ago, you will recognize so many true things! And, combined with the fact that this is a fictionalized account of the actual death of Catherine Newman’s actual best friend, you will nosily wonder what ELSE in it is true, if you know what I mean, and if you read it YOU WILL KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

So this is a recommendation of TWO BOOKS that BOTH have plots that may make you think you don’t want to read them, but I am telling you (1) I FELT THE SAME and (2) BUT TRY THEM BECAUSE YOU MAY FIND YOU END UP FEELING AS I DO ABOUT THEM. I have already given one or the other of these books as birthday gifts, and I plan to keep doing that all year.

We had a slightly funny thing happen just now, which is that Paul and I were out on an errand, and we came back into the house in the middle of a conversation, and we started putting things away as we were talking, and it took us more time than you’d expect to realize that some of the teenagers in the kitchen where we were talking and putting things away WERE NOT OURS. I noticed first and said “Aaaa!” and then Paul looked up and noticed and said “Aaaa!” It’s not that we forgot how many children we had, it’s that we apparently forgot how many of them could conceivably be in our kitchen. Eventually my brain did the math (“Wait: COULD there be four teenagers in your kitchen right now??”), which is when I looked up and said “Aaaa!”

I bought a new mug, even though I seriously, honestly, truly need to buy NO MORE MUGS—and since that purchase, I have several times MADE MYSELF SAD by thinking “What if I hadn’t bought this mug?”

I bought it at…let’s see. It was either Marshalls or HomeGoods. I drove Henry and his friends to the theater to watch the Dungeons & Dragons movie, and the theater is too far from home for it to make sense to drive back home and come back later to pick them up, so I narrowed it down to three options: I could read my book and play on my phone in the car for two hours; or I could watch a movie by men about how some men at Nike got a sportsman to work with them on a shoe for men; or I could go shopping and see if I could spend the $14 movie ticket price on something more interesting. I bought a mug and a small lidded saucepan, which together came to two cents less than $14, and I had a nice time shopping, too.

I relearned, however, that I Do Not Like To Be Out After Dark. I do not like it! I think I am…scared of the dark? I realize that sounds silly, but I think that’s what it is. If I am out even just as the sun is starting to go down, I start to feel A Foreboding. If I am out doing errands in the dark, I have to literally talk myself through it: “This is fine! It’s just dark out! But this is the same normal familiar HomeGoods parking lot that gives you no Bad Feelings when it’s daytime! You are going to walk to your same normal familiar car and nothing bad is going to happen! And then you are going to drive to Marshalls and have some fun shopping THERE! It’s fine that it’s dark out! It makes no difference!” It’s mostly if I am BY MYSELF in the dark, but it’s ESPECIALLY if I am doing Normal Daytime Things (like going to stores I normally go to in the daytime) but it’s night. There is something very creepy to me about being in a familiar daytime store, and seeing the dark outside the windows.