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.

I am finally taking the holiday cards down from around the kitchen doorway. I wait until I am GOOD AND READY. I do not rush it. If they are up until the next year’s cards begin arriving, SO BE IT.

LAST year I bought some reusable cloth gift-wrap bags, so THIS year I am cutting up some of the cards to make gift-tags for NEXT year. I have taken a break from this activity because it is feeling a little futile, in light of who I am as a person. I have cut up old Christmas cards to make gift-tags before; I even bought large specialty craft punches to make a nice decorative edge. Have I ever used a single one of those tags? No. Do I know where those punches are now, or the tags? No.

I am having trouble focusing on this task in part because I woke up at 2:45 a.m., and lay awake feeling fizzy and sick and having imaginary conversations with library management, and did not doze off again until after 5:30, and then woke up for the day at just before 7:00. There was a little feature on NPR the other day about how people who are sleep-deprived don’t realize they are acting irrationally; their behavior and feelings seem normal to them. Many people who claim they can get by on six hours a night, or four, are like people who are not getting unbiased external feedback on the efficacy of their natural deodorant.

I probably should have taken that into account when choosing to deal with an ongoing insurance issue. But, the thing is, I think it is the sleep deprivation that made me spring on it. I had HAD IT. I send blessings to the customer service representative who had to deal with me and my breaking, shaking voice and fragile disposition. I did stay civil, remembering always that she was a person and a representative of her company: she was not the company itself, nor its management, nor was she the previous representatives I have dealt with who evidently did not do what they said they would do, nor was she any of the many, many previous representatives I have dealt with over many, many years of dealing with insurance issues; and at the end of the call I thanked her for her help and also for her patience.

But for the love of god. I have had to make four separate lengthy phone calls, three to the provider and one to my insurance; and my insurance has also contacted the provider directly telling them I am not responsible for this bill, and I am still getting bills threatening me with collections. “CAN YOU SEE HOW MADDENING THIS IS??,” I asked the provider’s customer service representative at one point in the call. “…Yes,” she said. That calmed me more than anything else could have done—well, other than, for example, fixing the problem, which at this point feels like a fantasy. “IT IS STARTING TO FEEL AS IF BILLING IS NO LONGER CHECKING THEIR MESSAGES,” I said to her at another point, after she had explained that I could not contact Billing myself, but could only wait for her (as with the representatives before her) to “send this to Billing for review,” AGAIN. I want to remind you that this is for a bill my insurance company says I SHOULD NOT pay; and my insurance company has personally contacted the provider to “remind them of their contractual obligations not to harass the patient,” and a representative of the provider assured the insurance company that the balance would be wiped. And yet I am still getting threatening bills claiming I have not responded (NOT RESPONDED!!!!) to their requests for payment.

Meanwhile, the hospital where Edward goes for GI has utterly borked their own billing, so that we regularly get demands that we pay our delinquent account of $0 owed for a June 2019 visit. “THIS ACCOUNT IS PAST DUE,” with a big red block of ink around the text. You do not want to know how many times I have attempted to address this. “Wow!,” each representative says in turn, “That’s crazy! We’ll get that fixed for you!” The next month: another red, threatening letter. My hope is that whenever it goes to Collections, which it must have done NUMEROUS times by now over the years, Collections says “????” and puts it directly into the recycling. I hope they add an “Excuse me, WHAT?,” and maybe a big eye-roll, and maybe they show it to a coworker so they can roll their eyes together. Maybe they put it on a breakroom whiteboard for everyone to laugh at.

And then we got a delivery of oil; we have an oil furnace; it was here when we bought the house. In the last three weeks, we have used SO MANY HUNDRED DOLLARS’ WORTH of oil. This is not sustainable. We keep the thermostat at 65-66 degrees when we are home, and I am always cold; I wear a sweater over a shirt; I wear two pairs of socks and one of the pairs is wool; I have electric heating pads for my chairs; we have a down blanket on the bed in addition to another blanket and a quilt and flannel sheets. We have modern windows. I know there are places that will come out and do an evaluation to tell you where you are losing heat; we did this at our old house; probably we should do this at this house. I can barely make myself do things I WOULD enjoy doing, so it doesn’t seem likely that I will do that, but we should. At one point we had a geothermal guy come out, because we’d rather not be on oil heat; he persistently tried to talk Paul out of it, tried to sell him a gas hook-up. Gas is not better. We think it must have been a scam.

I had a brief conference with Paul and William while we were making our dinners. We are going to try using electric blankets and turning the heat much lower at night. When I stay over at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, they turn the heat way down at night and have wool blankets on the beds, and I sleep SO WELL. Getting up to pee is hell’s own torment, of course, but getting back into bed is delightful. We should have done this years ago, but we have had more than the typical number of bed-wetters, and also we have barfy cats, and so laundry has been a consideration. I think even if we have to throw away the occasional electric blanket, that will still be better overall.

I accidentally started two trilogies at the same time, one of which changed mid-trilogy from a trilogy to a series. Both have turned out to be the kinds of books I keep wanting to get back to, instead of doing what I am supposed to be doing.

First I read The Book of Koli, by M.R. Carey, but my library doesn’t own the second and third books so I had to order them from another library.

While I was waiting, I started reading Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir—a book I didn’t expect to like or finish, because it looked very Y.A. and the cover reviews mentioned bones and violence and “grotesque horror.” I thought I would just get it out of the way while I was waiting for the rest of the Koli books.

(image from Amazon.com)

Why, you may wonder, was I trying the book at all. It was because Paul had, in one of those internet rabbit-hole situations that started, if you can fathom it, with the “none pizza left beef” meme, found the book’s Wikipedia page and thought the “Style” section sounded like maybe we should get it for Henry for Christmas. But we already had enough books for Henry for Christmas so I got it out of the library for him, and he wasn’t interested but I thought I’d try it and see if I wanted to recommend he change his mind.

(screenshot from Wikipedia.org)

I DID like it, despite all the things I generally do NOT like, such as being thrown into a world where nothing makes sense, and where there is a lot of violence, and where fights are described blow-by-blow. Also, almost no one has a normal eye color. There is violet of course, and at least three kinds of grey, and golden, and something called “hurricane” (maybe that’s one of the greys?) and I just can’t adequately express how much I hate that—but it didn’t start until I was over 100 pages in and it was too late for me, and no one looked at themselves in the mirror to muse about their own eye color, so even that was well-handled as far as I was concerned. Like, if we MUST have purple and amber and storm-grey eyes, then let’s at least do it the right way. Also-also, it was in some cases necessary to the plot, so fine, FINE. But seriously, is there any universe in which we can just stop with the eyes.

There is no denying this is a book that includes violence, and confusing world-building, and annoying eye colors. But this is also VERY MUCH a book about characters and relationships and dialogue. For those who would find it relevant to their interests: this book contains the hate-to-love trope, and I felt it was done well rather than stupidly, and that it felt earned rather than contrived. Things never get explicit, and I’m not even 100% sure anything ever Happened In That Way. I have a nibling who likes to read but does not want to read sex stuff, and I would recommend this book to them. I think it would be fully possible to read this book and see only intense emotion and friendship. I think it is likely the author deliberately left some options in there for various kinds of readers.

The cover design amazes me, because while reading the book I went from deeply disliking the cover to LOVING it, and even spending time gazing at it affectionately. Think on THAT! I LOVE to look at that weird skull-faced person now!!

So there we were: I had finished Gideon the Ninth. By then the other two Koli books had come in for me; but also one of my coworkers, upon hearing I was reading Gideon the Ninth, said “If you’re liking it, I recommend getting the next two books right now: the people I know who liked this series REALLY REALLY LIKED IT.” So I’d brought home the next two books. And instead of returning to the first trilogy I’d started, I continued with the second. I read Harrow the Ninth and loved it, and loved the cover. Then I read Nona the Ninth, and learned to love the cover as I’d learned to love the cover of Gideon the Ninth.

Interestingly, the third book was supposed to be a different book. The author describes the actual third book as having “sucker punched” those plans. So now there will be a fourth book in the trilogy! Maybe more!

I should mention that after reading three books in the Locked Tomb series (that’s what the Tamsyn Muir series is called), I still have no idea what the hell is going on. This is what I mean about it being character/relationship-based, deep-down. If I were reading to understand what is going on with the world-building, I would have noped out, and long since. But I have GOT to know what happens with these PEOPLE. And I guess I would like to know what is happening with the war / revolution / deities??? / planetary soul energy???? / etc.

Reluctantly (because I wanted to start reading the next Locked Tomb book instead, which I can’t yet do), I went back to The Rampart trilogy, which is what the M.R. Carey series is called.

(image from Amazon.com)

Within about 15 minutes I was fully back into it. I finished the second book and have started the third, and basically that is my plan for this long weekend, which celebrates nothing I want to celebrate right now.

The Rampart trilogy is post-apocalyptic, where the apocalypse happened in a future one or two big steps ahead of our time—like, more-advanced technology and weapons and science had been developed than when we have now, and then most but not all of the human world fell to ruin. But aside from the better tech, the basic gist is familiar: the world ended because of climate change (described as the cities gradually going underwater inch by inch while politicians stood around and argued with each other about whether or not it was happening) and violence/war, and also by certain scientific advancements that were well-intentioned but turned against humanity (e.g., making trees more resistant to climate change accidentally made them evolve to consume humans and other animals by killing them and mashing their nutrients into the soil around their trunks).

People live in small villages again. There is a problem with villages dying out because their populations are too small for successful continued reproduction. There are diseases that no one knows how to treat anymore. The forests are alive with dangerous genetically-altered vegetation. People find old technology but they don’t know what it’s for and how it works; sometimes someone figures a piece of technology out, and that person is treated like a monarch/godlet. There are new religions that seem based on old religions, but in a way that makes all religion seem freshly strange. Things like that. I’m really enjoying it.

As with the Locked Tomb series, there is plenty of violence and death and hardship and scary things, but there is also a lot of character development and relationships and dialogue. There is a quest, and there is found-family, and there is a lot of stuff that feels PRETTY RELEVANT to our own times and our own issues.

I don’t know why it popped into my mind, but as I was folding laundry I remembered out of the blue how confusing and unhelpful the term “heavy petting” was for me as a pre-teen and teen. Honestly I still don’t understand it. I’m interested to know where I heard it, because I am pretty sure it was from dated teen fiction I checked out of the library AND ALSO from youth pastors AND from the Christian books for teens we had at my house. I had a mental picture of someone running their hand along someone else’s side, like from shoulder down to hip, WITH STRONG PRESSURE (to make it HEAVY). I was imagining this happening in a car: the teens would be on their sides facing each other from their respective seats in the car, seats tilted back, and I pictured the boy teen (I definitely, definitely, definitely pictured the boy teen being the one doing the Heavy Petting) running his hand down the girl’s side, repeatedly and probably kind of uncomfortably. It was hard to understand why God/parents/pastors/anyone would be so opposed—but it also didn’t seem like a temptation it would be very difficult to resist, so I did not worry too much.

I remember when I was in 7th or 8th grade, a couple of girls from the public school transferred to our Christian school. This represented a roughly 33% increase in the number of girls in our class, which was a combined 6th-7th or 7th-8th grade class, I don’t remember which year it was. These girls taught us right off the bat that knee socks (we all wore them) were NOT COOL, and showed us how to slouch them—and for this I thank them, even though my thin dressy knee socks WOULD NOT slouch properly. The next year I transferred to a public high school, and by then I had a nice full wardrobe of actual slouch socks.

These were also the girls we asked about French kissing. We picked our moment and asked during a sleepover, when it was dark and it felt like we could be bold. We instinctively felt they would know, and they did, though I don’t remember their explanation solving the mystery of why anyone would WANT to. We asked them if French kissing was the same as angel kissing (heaven knows where we’d found that term), and I don’t remember whether they said it was or whether they said they didn’t know, but either way I still don’t know what angel kissing is, if anything.