I am in Week Two of my two weeks’ notice. The director said last Monday that she would notify my supervisor and the other department heads of my departure, so I’d assumed the news would spread rapidly and I would not need to tell anyone myself. (I tend to choke up, and wanted to avoid the drama.)

But by the end of the first week, no one seemed to know yet, and I was feeling increasingly awkward about it. So Friday evening I texted a handful of people from work: the ones who are my outside-work friends, and might already feel hurt about the gap between giving notice and telling them about it. One of them asked if the news was private, and I said no she could tell people, and she apparently told EVERYONE WE WORK WITH, which is an outcome I need to remember for the future when I want some news spread for me.

So this past Monday, my last Monday, I did not need to worry anymore about spreading the news. There has been some very gratifying feedback. One department head wondered if we could put a poll on the staff whiteboard about who should leave, me or my supervisor. Another wondered aloud about who my supervisor would try to push out next. Excellent, excellent. One department head asked the question I wasn’t sure how I’d handle (“Why are you leaving?”) and I wasn’t really ready for it despite having plenty of time to think about it and prepare; but I did manage to say it was because I couldn’t work for [supervisor’s name] any more. I referred to the supervisor’s pattern of going after one person after another, as if it were something we both knew about; and said it had been my turn, and that I wasn’t going to stay around for it. This department head is very, very level and calm and professional and poker-faced, so it was hard to read any reaction; she listened and inclined her head and didn’t reply, which is on-brand for her. If she were thinking “WHAT?? You UNGRATEFUL PEASANT, HOW DARE YOU PUT HER ILLUSTRIOUS NAME IN YOUR FILTHY MOUTH???” or if she were thinking “Yes, YES, another milestone in our attempt to OVERTHROW THE EVIL LEADER!!!!,” there’d be no indication either way.

I am still feeling good about my decision to leave, and I am counting the days; also I am still feeling sad and mad about it, which seems about right. I’ve made plans to have lunch with a coworker/friend right after my last day; those plans involve potatoes and gravy and cheese.

LET’S TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. I had something else, I am sure of it. But what.

OH! Yes. Listen, do any of you have experience with ONGOING RECURRING INCESSANT KIDNEY STONES? Paul has them, as did his mother. His kidney stones only just kicked into gear over the last five-ish years, and he has had a couple of ER trips, and one surgery/stent. In my opinion, the medical system then just said “Okay, good luck, byyyyyeeeeee!!”—no instructions about future follow-ups; no information about how to reduce future occurrences, other than to drink plenty of water, which he already does to a near-alarming extent. He realizes from his own research that kidney stones are difficult to figure out and hard to prevent for many many reasons, but it still seems like maybe he should have a follow-up to at least DISCUSS with a PROFESSIONAL what he MIGHT TRY to prevent them from HAPPENING CONSTANTLY, AS THEY ARE NOW. I have been pushing him to make an appointment (the DOCTOR is not going to call HIM), and he hasn’t been doing it.

Now he is going on a business trip to the U.K. (we are in the U.S.A.), and I am worried that he will have a kidney stone crisis while there. I want him TO HAVE ALREADY SEEN the specialist, and TO HAVE ALREADY OBTAINED medications he could take with him, just in case, to get him through an attack if it happens, at least until he can get back home. He has not done this.

What I would like to know is: Was this a foolish hope ANYWAY? That is: is there nothing the specialist could/would have given him, even if he HAD made the appointment? Or is this something I should keep pushing him to do for FUTURE business trips if not this one?

The day before I gave my two weeks’ notice, I was still not sure I was going to give my two weeks’ notice. I’d started a resignation letter on Friday, and worked on it over the weekend, and left myself a “PRINT LETTER” reminder for Monday morning so I’d have a chance to look it over one more time before going to work.

Monday morning, I put the letter in an envelope and put it in my work bag. I told myself I could bring it with me but that didn’t mean I HAD TO put it on the director’s desk. I could abort the mission at any time, and recycle the letter and change the date and try again later, or never do it at all.

But when I arrived at work, I knew I was going to put it on the director’s desk: it was the way I felt in the parking lot about facing another Monday with this supervisor; the way I wished I’d put it on the director’s desk LAST week, so I’d only have one week left. My adrenaline was high and my heart was pounding—but it reminded me of something I read in a book about hoarders: that a hoarder’s highest level of stress is right before putting an item in the donate/trash pile. At that moment, still holding onto the item, they would describe their stress levels as nearly intolerable. But if asked again even just a few minutes after letting go of the item, they would describe their stress levels as nearly non-existent: it’s the moment of decision and letting-go that’s stressful.

I put the letter on the director’s desk. The VERY MINUTE after I did it, I felt peaceful and good. For AGES I’ve been stressed at work, holding the job over the trash can, not sure whether to let go; I let go of it, and my stress levels plummeted. I felt like I was breathing again. I could feel the air going into my lungs, and my lungs expanding into a roomier space than before. I felt floaty, buzzy, happy.

I knew there would be several more stressful incidents before this was fully over, but it felt like I was ticking them off one by one, and that there weren’t many more to get through. The next one happened that same morning: the director asked if I had a minute. We had a good talk: exchanging mutual goodwill, both of us saying we were sorry that it had come to this. She asked if I wanted an exit interview and I said hell yes, so that will be on my last day. I plan to use that discussion to make sure she understands exactly why I am quitting: HR said the behaviors I described would REQUIRE a manager to take action, and I want to make sure she heard those behaviors, instead of hearing only my emotions. She ended the meeting by saying she would notify my supervisor, HR, and the board of trustees of my departure. I left her office feeling like I had a wonderful secret. No one knew I was leaving except the director and me.

That afternoon right after work I texted my former supervisor, the one my current supervisor got rid of with a campaign much more severe than the one she ran against me. (He was at an intermediary level of management, between her and me, and his position has not been replaced.) He suggested an impulsive late lunch at the mall’s food court, and we vented about the supervisor and imagined karmic outcomes for her, and speculated about which employee she’d target next. We were giddy and vengeful. It was the perfect way to celebrate a two weeks’ notice.

I have continued to feel almost HIGH. After that most recent meeting with my supervisor, I hadn’t been able to drink coffee because I was baseline too wound up / adrenalized / heart-poundy. I’ve been On Something (prescription tranquilizers; sedating antihistimines; stress tea with kava; L-theanine; etc.) every single day at work since then, and still haven’t felt good/calm. The day after I gave my notice, I returned to normal: drinking coffee, not having to take anything to get through the shift. I go into each day feeling good, cheerful, flirty again with my coworkers. I am feeling sentimental about what I will be leaving behind, but of COURSE I am: it was a good job! It was! I’m not leaving because the JOB was bad! I LOVED the job! And yet overall, I am feeling happy when thinking things such as “This is my second-to-last Tuesday.” I am not feeling any regret. I am not feeling as if maybe I should have stayed. I am feeling as if I broke free from a tractor beam. I am feeling as if I found the key to the handcuffs, and used it while the captor was otherwise occupied, and got away free, and the triumphant music swelled, and everyone felt relieved and happy as I ran away into the cleansing rain.

I still haven’t told anyone at work that I’m leaving, and my supervisor hasn’t mentioned it to me—or, as far as I can tell, to anyone else. Her energy has changed significantly. As of last Friday I would have described her energy as plotting, manipulative, and sparklingly malevolent. Her energy as of Monday afternoon is hard to describe, but to throw out some approximations I’d say she has seemed off-kilter, unmoored, uncertain, unarmed, dazed. I think my continued failure to spread the news to other employees is throwing her off even more, and she doesn’t know how to behave. To take it further and speculate wildly about the workings of someone else’s mind, I’d speculate that she THOUGHT she was playing a game where she’d win if I quit; but when I actually quit, she briefly regained perspective and realized that for a manager, this was losing the game; she may also be worrying about what I might have told the director; and the director may have told her that I went to HR, which should worry her even more; she may be looking back over her own past behaviors in a new light. She may also have snapped into the reality of what this means for scheduling, and hiring, and training. She took an absolutely reliable and capable and fully-trained and self-managing and self-motivating employee with six years’ experience and chased her away; now she gets to deal with that fallout. I think she got caught up in the game and forgot about everything else.

I do plan to tell every single employee why I am leaving. I am working on the phrasing. I need something tidy, shruggy, accurate. Something that clicks into place when they hear it. Something MEMORABLE. Something that, ideally, comes to their minds when my supervisor targets another employee.

One of the things keeping me from quitting my library job is anxiety about what to do next. I hate applying for jobs; I hate trying to figure out what even I want to apply for; I hate being new at a job; I hate that whole time of feeling slow and not very useful, and not knowing my coworkers yet. There’s a post on Twitter/Bluesky that’s like “Being new at a job is so embarrassing for no reason,” and I went to find it so I could give credit, and it turns out it is one of those posts many, many people have made.

I am worried that I will get a new job and again face issues with a manager. Isn’t it interesting how many bad managers there are? I wonder why there are so many. And why they get paid so much to make other people unhappy.

I am worried that it’s not the managers, it’s me. When you have bad manager after bad manager, it starts to seem like maybe it’s not the managers. But also: I’ve always worked entry-level jobs with no education/experience needed, and I think those jobs tend to have bad managers. And also: not all my managers have been bad.

I’m worried I won’t get a new job. I’ll be bored, and listless, and I won’t do anything even though I know it would make me feel better to do something. The current political situation has me already hip-deep in despair; the sudden loss of a regular scheduled time for productivity and physical activity and a little social contact seems like a bad idea.

I’m worried about the money. Because I stayed home with the kids, all of our household’s finances (house, cars, bills) are set up for what we could afford on Paul’s income alone, so we will not be in financial crisis if I quit. And because I work part-time entry-level jobs with no education/experience needed, my pay is not much. But my income was nice for breathing room, and for sending impulsive donations, and for soothing my anxiety about money overall. I can get a new job that does all those same things, but there will be a gap. And I am worried I will not GET a new job, either because I won’t take action or because no one will hire me.

I am trying not to let all these anxieties stop me from leaving a bad situation. It is a bad situation, and deserves leaving, even if there is no good situation waiting. The manager is a bad manager, and deserves leaving, even if the next manager is also bad. It is valid and sensible to wonder if a situation might be “Out of the frying pan, into the fire”—but that doesn’t make “staying in the frying pan” a viable option.

I need to get past the feeling that I should stay with the job because I shouldn’t have let a bad manager ruin it for me. It HAS been ruined for me. It shouldn’t have been, but it still has been. Earlier in this post, I call my time there “a time for productivity and physical activity and a little social contact”—but these days, when I am there, it is ACTUALLY a time of stress and aversion and agitation; and when I’m home and supposed to be resting, I’m thinking over the stressful things that happened, and trying to change reality with my mind (“I should have said THIS”).

I also need to get past the idea that I can’t leave because my bad supervisor will be happy and will feel as if she’s won. She likely WILL feel those things; there is a sense in which she HAS IN FACT won. She got me to leave, and my departure WILL make her happier. But that doesn’t mean I need to stay and be unhappy. And my coworkers will not feel happy that I am leaving, and my departure will make them less happy with the supervisor, so if I WERE going to dwell on People’s Feelings About My Actions, not that I SHOULD, then maybe People’s Feelings balance out. And also, my supervisor may feel happy, but my absence will make her life more difficult, because she is not good at scheduling or at planning ahead, so she is going to have a serious and rapidly-accumulating shelving situation to deal with. She says anyone can shelve, and she’ll get to see if that theory checks out!

And I hope you already know I know/feel this, but I don’t want to downplay the immense privilege it is to be hand-wringing over all this. Many people are in work situations much worse than mine, and don’t have the ability to just leave—or can’t leave until they have something else lined up, and nothing else is lining up. I am going to try to focus on how nice it is to be able to make this decision in a relatively low-stakes way. It still feels bad, and I am still unhappy about it, but I am not truly stuck, and I have the ability to make the choice, and that is a very lucky thing, and I know it.

An ad situation: If you are getting a stupid ad popping up when you try to comment, actively PREVENTING YOU FROM COMMENTING, know that you are not alone. I am about one inch from getting rid of the ad server on this blog, because it is not very much money and it is intermittently very much hassle—not only because of stuff like the comment-preventing pop-ups (there are not supposed to be ANY pop-ups), but also in terms of tax prep. It’s an easy form when I’m doing it myself (one sheet of paper, one number, one business name)—but we have a tax preparer do our taxes now, and adding that one form adds another big chunk of expense to the preparation costs.

A cat feeding situation: Normally we bring out the cat food three times a day, and the cats can eat as much as they want during those three windows of time, which tend to be lengthy because we get distracted doing something else and forget to take away the bowls. We do it this way because one of the four cats has a little grazing issue (girl, same). But it is unfortunate, because ANOTHER of our cats is getting skinny and shivery with old age, and we want him to eat a kibble every single time it occurs to him; and now ANOTHER cat is having a temporary digestive issue that means he is not eating as much as he should, and should ALSO eat a kibble every single time it occurs to him. Anyway, all this means we are currently leaving the bowls out all the time, and the cats do not know what to do with their time now that they’re not spending so much of it monitoring us to see if we’re getting out the food bowls yet.

The job situation: I set myself one and a half goals. Goal one was to meet with Human Resources; the half goal was to maybe meet with the director, but I thought that would probably be ceremonial at best, and fuel for lying awake having imaginary conversations at worst. I met with HR last week, and it went very well. She said the issues I was describing were issues a manager would be required to take action on, if those issues were reported to them—but of course that means reporting the issues. She strongly advised me to meet with the director. I explained why I thought that would be fruitless, and she basically said Nevertheless. She said even if I got nowhere, even if I thought nothing would come of it, she still strongly advised it. She has a reputation for disliking my supervisor, so I felt inclined to take her advice.

So I met with the director. It is hard to say if it was fruitless. It felt pretty fruitless. She’s a very good listener, and she’s easy to talk to; but numerous coworkers have mentioned that after they talk to her they feel great, and then a few weeks later they notice nothing has changed. She’s like talking to AI. She assured me that she heard me and would take my issues seriously, and also assured me that she was “working on” my supervisor. Okay, but there is no base material to work with. My supervisor does not have the temperament, education, training, or instincts for being a good manager, so I don’t think working on the training is going to do enough to make her tolerable for me to work under. And the director HAS been working on her, for over a year, and I have not seen any improvement, and if anything things have gotten worse.

I do feel good about Completing My Two Meetings, though. Now I am in the will-she-or-won’t-she quitting phase, and probably will-she. I have started composing my quitting letter, and this is where I’m stuck. I don’t know if it should be extremely simple, as all my previous quitting letters have been (basically “This will be my last day”), or if I should use this as an opportunity to make it really clear why I’m leaving. I have left bad managers before, without putting that in my resignation letter. But I’ve never had meetings about my bad managers before, and I’ve always been leaving jobs I wanted to leave anyway, so this feels different.

What about one absolutely bland resignation letter (last day / bland assertion of goodwill), and one letter laying out some reasons? My friend Surely mentioned I could make the second letter a summary/record of each of the two meetings: thanking them for their time, mentioning what was brought to their attention, hoping the issues can be resolved, wishing everyone well. (She added that I could say I was sharing this information with the board of trustees, but warned that that doesn’t leave the door open if my supervisor might leave for other reasons and I might want to be re-employed at the library.)

I cannot adequately express how much I appreciated the extremely helpful and bolstering variety of responses on the Job post. And the suggestions that I stay on FOR SPITE were so funny, it considerably deflated the stress of the whole thing.

Which is not to say that I did not wake up at 4:00 a.m. and go immediately into mentally-reliving-and-reimagining mode. And I have continued doing it all day. I contacted my doctor and got a refill on a short-acting medication that can be helpful to take at such times. I put the bottle into my work bag. (I have also increased my willingness to consider a more daily medication, especially in this ongoing political climate. I would be even more open to the idea if such medications had worked better the last time I tried them.)

This morning I went for a walk with a sympathetic coworker, and we talked through some options. There is another coworker who is being actively hassled by this same supervisor; we’re in different departments and hardly ever overlap, but I think I should go have a chat with her. I will at some point have to talk to the director; I wish I were someone who could do difficult talks without crying, but we do what we can with what we have. (Also: I took my short-acting medication before my meeting with my supervisor, and I DID NOT CRY.) I also may make an appointment with HR and see what they have to say; they do exit interviews, and several employees have left because of this supervisor, and rumor has it that the lead HR person “can’t stand” this supervisor. (That does not seem to have saved those other employees, however, or resulted in any action against my supervisor.) I am acquaintances with a member of the board of trustees; perhaps I will ask her to have coffee with me.

NOW LET US TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE, ANYTHING ELSE, BECAUSE I AM GOING MAD. I hate hate hate this stage of things, when my mind CANNOT leave something alone. I know it will pass; it always passes. But in the meantime it is like being infected by a brain virus.

Do you know, sometimes when I am afflicted with a brain virus and/or lying awake at night, I will think to myself “Let’s think about something HAPPY!!,” and sometimes I can’t think of anything? Literally can’t think of anything—or at least, nothing that doesn’t immediately lead to another stressful thought. (This is another reason I am considering a daily medication.)

Because of course there are happy things. There are so many happy things. Soon there will BULB FLOWERS! There was recently a BABY. There are BOOKS TO READ. There is another library just ten minutes away, if my own library ends up ruined for me because of this job. There are the mini road trips taking the college kids back and forth, with big boxes of road-trip snacks, and sometimes an overnight in a motel by myself! There are Easter care packages to assemble, and there are Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs (in my opinion, the best of the Reese’s format). There are cats. There is my friend’s dog, who accompanies us on our walks so I get some Dog Time as well as some Friend Time and some Mental and Physical Health. There is CHRISTMAS; I know it is March, but the years go by faster and faster. Paul and I have booked a vacation (more on this later), which isn’t happening until next year, and it is causing me some stress but mostly I like to think about it, and I like that I have plenty of time to think about it. Paul’s workplace’s annual outing-with-spouses is going to be a baseball game this year, and I have never been to a baseball game; and because it is organized by someone else, I can be (more) interested and happy, rather than (as) stressed about figuring it all out.

I want to choose us a topic other than my work situation, but it feels cheesy and forced to suggest we list things to be happy about. What if the topic is SAY LITERALLY ANYTHING. It CAN be something to be happy about, but let’s not have any pressure about that. There is something just as satisfying about a good complaint. Do you want to complain about something happening at work? I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR IT. Do you have a coping method for dealing with a temporary brain virus? PLEASE SHARE. Are you SO SICK OF SNOW? TELL ME. Have you read a good book? LET US IN ON IT. Are you looking forward to something? WE WANT TO KNOW. Is there a food you are currently a little obsessed with? IT’S ALL GOOD INFO. (Have you tried the spicy dill pickle Goldfish Crisps? I bought them as a sort of joke, and we did not stop eating them until they were all gone.)

(image from pepperidgefarm.com)

Things have been getting worse at my job. Twice my supervisor has had a sit-down meeting with me to scold/question me over something where I am not actually in trouble. That is, I have not done anything wrong, but she wishes to make me feel as if I have done something wrong. I have been able to retain the presence of mind to ask questions such as “Have I broken a rule?” and “Did I violate a policy?,” which helps, since she has had to say no.

In the most recent meeting, I said THREE TIMES that I did not understand why were were having the meeting. She “just wanted to understand” why I was “so upset” about a policy. “So upset” means that the other day she said something was fine, and I said I was not fine with it, actually; that was me being “so upset.” She added that she just didn’t understand why I was SO EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED. I explained some, and she kept shaking her head like it was all so weird to her, and that’s when I said I didn’t actually understand why we were having the meeting to talk about this again. We already had this meeting about the rule, and I understood that she was the boss and that she gets to make the decisions, and I was obeying her rules even though I didn’t agree with them. She circled back to exaggerating how “emotional” I’d been, and downplaying the negative effects of her rule. The third time I brought it back to BUT WHY ARE WE HAVING THIS MEETING, I said again that I understood she was in charge, and that I was obeying her rules; but that if she wanted me to agree that they were good rules, or if she wanted me not to resent having to follow rules I consider foolish, that’s not something she can have. That’s where we ended the meeting—except as we stood up, she said I should come to her with any other rules I didn’t feel were right. I said I had thoroughly learned that there was absolutely no reason to bother doing that.

Overall I felt I held my ground pretty well. But this brings things more to a head than they were before. She diminished my concerns, diminished my role. She said I wasn’t looking at the bigger picture—the things people who were there 40-60 hours a week would see. I said I didn’t see how micromanaging the page’s work priorities were bigger picture, and she swerved and said there’s no such thing as a page, we’re all library assistants. (Okay? But I am the library assistant assigned to the paging shifts, so.) She used Gotcha arguments: “If you care so much about customer service, we can make sure you get plenty of time on the desk.” (I said “That is not what I meant, and you know that’s not what I meant.”) She has implied that I want to do things a certain way because I am selfish and want to hog all the fun parts of my job for myself. She tried to blame the library’s director for these decisions, but I already talked to the director and the director says it’s all up to my supervisor. She tried to blame ME for the decisions, saying I came to them with the problem. (It’s true, I did, but the problem was my supervisor’s bad system, and I hadn’t realized they would “solve it” in such a ridiculous, senseless way that breaks more than it fixes, and then would not care when I gave feedback on those changes.) She has shown me that she will not budge, even on foolish rules where she gets lots of feedback explaining why they don’t work. She makes bad decisions and she sticks to them no matter what. She has lost all my respect. She is bad at her job, and apparently no one is going to stop her or get rid of her.

So the question is, can I continue working there. I love the work. I love most of my coworkers. I have never liked a job for more than 6 months, and I’ve liked this job for well over 6 years. The schedule and flexibility work for me, and it’s within walking distance of my house, and it’s all indoor work with climate-control. I am very good at the work, and the work is good for me both mentally and physically. It checks my preference for a Richard Scarry Community Job that everyone understands and likes the idea of.

But I’m starting to spend a fair amount of time outside of work agitating about work stuff. I have been documenting the way my supervisor is treating me—but I realized I don’t want to work for a company where I have to document how my supervisor is treating me. Plus, so much of it is these tiny things where it’s hard to explain why I’m even documenting it. An example: every other Friday, she hands out the paychecks to everyone who’s there; she puts mine in the drawer with the ones for the people who aren’t there. So tiny, right? Who even cares? But she’s doing a LOT of these little who-cares things, directed at me.

I think I have to leave. But I hate hate hate that this is how things are. I’m so resistant to the idea that I am the one who has to lose my job, when it’s someone else who is behaving badly.

I am remembering, too, what some of you have said in the past and I have found so extremely useful: “a decision needs to be made” doesn’t mean it needs to be made RIGHT THIS MINUTE. I can continue to coast. But it feels at this point like I am circling the inevitable.

We have done so much LOGISTICS recently. One kid, at a nearer college, came home just for the weekend, for “no reason” (i.e., no reason we could get out of him, but he said to pick him up right after his last class on Friday and return him at the very latest we were willing to drive him on Sunday, so); one kid came home for a few days for a recurring medical treatment, and had to be fetched and returned; two kids from a farther-away college needed to be fetched for spring break; and now the kid at the nearer college needs to be fetched today for his spring break. (I wish the spring breaks had been the same week, but at least they will have a couple of days’ overlap.) Oh, and then of course we still have to return the two kids to the farther-away college, and then in a week return the kid to the closer college. Lots of driving.

There are few things I love as much as having someone else’s baby to look forward to, but babies have been thin on the ground the last decade or two as all my peers and cousins stopped having them. Now there is beginning to be the very beginnings of the next wave of babies, to mix baby metaphors. My cousin, who is one of my three dearest friends, just welcomed her first grandbaby. One of Elizabeth’s friend’s sisters is in labor right now. Soon it will be other friends’ kids, and possibly even my own kids, if we take a longer view and/or if something unexpected happens.

It’s just so pleasing to think about—and it was so fun to shop for baby things for my cousin’s grandchild. I want to do MORRRRRRRRRRRRE of it. I’m going to ask Elizabeth if it would be weird to send a gift to her friend’s sister. I’m guessing YES but also that no one will actually stop me. And I remember we got baby gifts from unexpected people when we were having our babies, and it never seemed WEIRD-weird, just a little surprising. Like, why is Paul’s coworker’s wife sending us a sleeper?—but how nice. Why did we get a gift from my high school friend’s parents?—but how nice. This is apparently from a friend of my mom’s, who we’ve never met—but how nice.

SEAGULL print
(image from Amazon.com)

I feel the same way about Overdoing It, gift-wise. I have a rough idea in my head about how much would be normal for me to spend, based on my relationship with the recipient, and with baby gifts I like to quadruple that. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I can’t resist quadrupling it. I START by thinking, okay, I should get one or two of these little sleep-and-plays, maybe one board book, call it a day. Before I know it, it’s the nursing pillow, three sleep-and-plays, and four board books. Oh, and a pack of these nice flannel nursing pads. Well, and now this other sleep-and-play, the one I reluctantly cut from the cart, is on such a good sale; I’ll just send that too. I feel like that will come across as A Little Weird, but not as WEIRD-weird. And I remember the same thing happening when we were having our babies: sometimes someone with a smaller connection, such as my mother’s cousin, would send a gift MUCH MUCH LARGER than we would have expected—and in fact we wouldn’t have expected a gift at all. And it was like WHOA—but how nice.

NPR is my primary source of news, if we don’t count Bluesky and let’s not. I appreciate NPR’s relentlessly calm, measured tone, especially in contrast to what I’ve been forced to see/hear from programs that are not legally allowed to categorize themselves as news, such as F0xNews. But on the other hand, sometimes they are SO calm and measured, I miss that something enormous has happened. “Israel and the U.S. applied military strikes in Iran. Iran has confirmed the death of their Supreme Leader, and an estimated forty of their highest-ranking officials. Breezy and sunny today, possible snow flurries, highs in the 40s.” “The Pentagon canceled a contract with Anthropic AI, after Anthropic said their AI could not be used to spy on U.S. citizens or to use autonomous deadly force without human involvement. The Pentagon has made a new contract with OpenAI. Now it’s time for the weekly puzzle, with Will Shortz.”

Two of my weakest subjects are history and geography and, as you’ve heard me say before, I did not truly tune into politics until 2015. This means that when my country teams up with Israel and bombs Iran, I need a lot of relentlessly calm, measured context, and I need to hear it repeatedly until it starts to sink in. I had a 7-hour drive (Edward was home for an infusion and needed to be returned to school), and I listened to hours of commentary, trying to understand. By about the third run-through, I felt I had the gist, or at least the outline of the gist.

But I think NPR could go even a little deeper/clearer, or perhaps have a daily/weekly program for people who need remedial-level news. For example, I needed them to tell me what a Supreme Leader is. It SOUNDS important. But what IS it? If someone killed the United States’ “Supreme Leader,” who would that be, approximately? And it wouldn’t be silly to remind me what our own government’s rules are about killing one of those. And maybe go ahead and do a little sidebar on which one is Iran and which one is Iraq. That kind of thing.

Also, sometimes NPR tries to put things into a relatable context, but I feel like they miss. The other day, they were explaining that Russia says they’ll only make a peace deal with Ukraine if Ukraine gives Russia a large chunk of Ukraine—about a quarter of it. The newscaster said that Ukraine is about the size of Texas, so this would be like if the United States had to give up a quarter of Texas to another country in order to stop that country from attacking it. NO. No. I am bad at geography, but I am good at similes. This is like if the United States had to give up a quarter OF THE UNITED STATES to another country, in order to stop that country from attacking us.

Out of the blue I remembered the kids’ assistant karate teacher, who was more into sword-fighting than karate, but apparently parents are less willing to pay for instruction in that. During a break, he presented me with a thought puzzle: You are in a fight, and a knife is drawn; what do you do?

Well, let me just tell you how much I hate questions like this from strangers. My brain turns into blue Icee slush. I am being tested, I am on the spot, I did not know there would be a test; this differs from my stress dreams only in that my stress dreams are more about not being able to find the classroom in which the test will be given, and being increasingly late for the test.

Coming up with The Correct Answer is more important to me than anything else in this life, and that is a normal thing to feel, especially for a person more inclined than the average person to freeze when asked an unexpected question. I came up with, “….Uh. I’d. Run away?” He said, “Ah!” So pleased, so very “Ah, young grasshopper!” even though he was probably fifteen years younger than me; “And why did you assume the other person had the knife?” Ho ho HO! It was a GOTCHA. A set-up. A trap. I was SUPPOSED to fall into that trap, and he WANTED me to fall into that trap, and he would have been DISAPPOINTED if I had NOT fallen into the trap—and yet I have spent over a dozen years blushing and cringing for falling into that trap.

Later, I thought: why didn’t I say “Um. Because I don’t, um. Carry a fighting knife? Or have fights. So. Like. If I were in an physical altercation, and a knife were drawn, that would be an altercation in which I would not draw a knife, because I would not have one? Or know how to use it in a fight? That’s why I RIGHTLY assumed it was the other person who had one, in this hypothetical scenario?”

Or why didn’t I say, “You are not correctly imagining the typical situations in which a woman finds herself in an altercation where a knife is drawn.”

Instead I listened to our young fellow explain to me how important it was to know how to defend yourself with a sword.

I finished a book that I would like to recommend to you but I cannot. Instead I will tell you about it, and you can decide for yourself if you would like it to be a recommendation.

(image from Amazon.com)

All Fours, by Miranda July

Relatedly, this headline from The Onion:

(image from theonion.com)

This book READS LIKE autobiographical fiction. I’m not in any way saying it IS autobiographical fiction: I don’t know what Miranda July’s whole thing is. But it READS that way. Often that is one of my favorite kinds of fiction: either the author is writing about what actually happened, or they are writing realistically about another way their life could have gone with the same real cast of characters they have, and either way I am ALL IN.

I try to wait awhile before looking at an author’s photo, because it can strongly influence how I perceive the book. In this case, I looked at the author’s photo about 1/4th of the way through the book, and my thought was “Yep, that checks out.” It made me like the book MORE, because it FIT. The author’s photo makes her look MISERABLE and COOL, and that was the vibe I was getting.

The ONLY reason I can’t recommend this book is the sex stuff: I can’t recommend it, and then imagine you reading it and thinking about how I read it too. And we can spend hours and hours unpicking why exactly someone might not like to read really explicit sex scenes in books, but the enduring fact is that I don’t like to read really explicit sex scenes in books. Maybe you LOVE to! In which case you can consider this a recommendation! Unless you only like CERTAIN KINDS of explicit sex scenes, and find OTHER kinds of explicit sex scenes upsetting! And maybe you’d like to spend hours and hours unpicking THAT, or maybe you’d just like to say you prefer not, and move on!

But MOST of the book is the kind of thing I would really like to recommend to you. ONE: the narrator is a perimenopausal woman! TWO: I liked the way the narrator thought about herself, and about this stage of life: I felt she was SMART and INTROSPECTIVE and INTERESTING. THREE: the narrator consults with her friends in ways I found appealing and aspirational; I ended up loving her friends as much as I loved her! FOUR: despite the fact that the narrator sort of persistently and convincingly describes herself as a difficult person, I found her very likeable and interesting, to the point of consistently and significantly preferring her over her husband who is described much more favorably (see also: Catherine Newman). FIVE: the narrator makes the kind of life choices that many of us in more mainstream timelines might like to explore mentally if not actually! SIX: the room she creates with a decorator makes me want to CRY, because I want that exact thing so much for myself! SEVEN: I love the characters and the dialogue. The exchanges the narrator has with the decorator and with the motel owner! I made Paul listen to me read them out loud.