Category — Uncategorized

There’s a post that has been making its way around the Internet for the last week or two.  The author speaks about a lesson she learned at her brother’s funeral.  A community showed up to say goodbye to him.  While the author has friends and family, she realized she didn’t have a community.  At least, not a group of people she could count on in the way that her brother — who invested many of his hours into his community — could when he was at the end of his life.

She describes all the things these people did for the family, and then writes,

This was community. And what I would come to learn, slowly, is that community is about a series of small choices and everyday actions: how to spend a Saturday, what to do when a neighbor falls ill, how to make time when there is none. Knowing others and being known; investing in somewhere instead of trying to be everywhere.

I paused after reading that passage.  Do I have a community or do I have a mishmash of family and friends?
And what is the difference, and how important is that difference?  I checked in with my heart: was I lonely?  There are times when I don’t make time for other people; when I give everything to Josh and the twins and then crawl into bed and move the phone calls I have to make over one day on the to-do list.

I need to stop doing that.

Because, like the author, “My community will be here for my family if I cannot be. And if I die, my kids will be surrounded people who know and love them, quirks and warts and oddities and all.”

It’s a really gorgeous piece.  I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

My new obsession is puzzle fiction.  I fell in love with Robin Sloan’s Sourdough — he’s the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.  It feels a little bit like a food-focused Mr. Penumbra (as opposed to “book-focused”).  So I looked up his website and signed up for his newsletter, hoping he had another book in the works.

One of the newsletters in the archive covered a genre he calls puzzle fiction.  They’re books that sometimes contain a mystery, but they’re not a conventional mystery.  Think The Westing Game.  (Or, really, anything Ellen Raskin.)  They’re more like verbal sudoku or puzzle solving, and he gives a few examples including the 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (Stuart Turton) and Gnomon (Nick Harkaway).  Both sound so cool.

I was trying to find other books that fit this genre, books that contain a central puzzle, but they’re not straight mystery.  Maybe Maureen Johnson’s Truly Devious series?  Or John Green’s Paper Town?  Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murder?  (That last one may be too much of a mystery-mystery than puzzle fiction.)  As Sloan says, “they just have to be interested in the processes of puzzle-making and puzzle-solving as well as the mental state—not unpleasant—of being puzzled.”

What else would be on this list?

Hell yes.

Over in Scotland, women are calling for schools to add information about miscarriages into the sex education curriculum:

Now, charities and women have called for the issue to be discussed in schools as part of normal sex education classes, and say this would help future generations understand how to cope and remove any taboo surrounding it.

Raise your hand if you felt totally alone after a miscarriage?  I remember once being with a group of women. One woman was talking about her miscarriage, and pretty much everyone in the room stepped forward with her own story, and the first woman cried something like, “Why didn’t you tell me before now?  I felt so alone.”  No person should go into family building without knowing this possibility.

If we’re telling kids about sex, STDs, and pregnancy, why aren’t we telling them about miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death?  Isn’t the whole point of education to prepare people?  To impart knowledge?  Why would we withhold important facts from a conversation?  And while we’re at it; if we speaking about fertility, we should tell people about infertility.  Let’s take the surprise and stigma away by making it an integral part of every person’s education.

Sending support over to Scotland and hoping we implement something here.

Josh and I were once at an Elvis Costello concert in DC, and we started talking to the couple next to us.  They were a long way from their home on the west coast.  They told us that part of their retirement plan was to look at where favourite musicians were playing, and then randomly visit a city and see the show.  So they flew across the country to check out DC during the day and then see Elvis Costello at night.  If the city was boring, they still had the concert, and if the city was amazing, they got to have a fantastic trip all-around.

It sounded like a cool idea.

The ChickieNob worships Tig Notaro, and she asked me to check if there was any way to see her live.  She wasn’t coming to DC, but she would be in a city a little over two hours away.  We decided to be like that couple and plan a trip around a performance.  So last Saturday, we drove up to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ate chocolate at Hershey’s Chocolate World during the day, and then headed over to see Tig perform live.

Third row seats, baby.

The twins were a tad younger than the rest of the crowd.  As in, we didn’t see anyone else close to their age.  But they didn’t care.  We laughed so hard; that kind of laugh that also sort of hurts because you can’t catch your breath and tears are rolling down your face.  And when it was done, we walked back to the hotel, repeating our favourite moments.  And the Wolvog asked if we could become Tig Notaro groupies and just follow her from show to show.

Um… sure?

So that’s where you’ll find us from now on.  Just going from Tig Notaro show to Tig Notaro show, and watching her Netflix shows in between.

Like super odd job.  So the title of the article is “The Job That Will Let You Do Whatever You Want in a Swedish Train Station, Forever.”

Did I click?  Of course, I clicked.

It’s one part art installation, one part social experiment.  Anyone in the world can apply.  An explanation:

Each morning, the chosen employee will punch a clock in Korsvägen train station, currently under construction in Gothenburg, Sweden, which will turn on a bank of bright fluorescent lights. Other than that, “the position holds no duties or responsibilities besides the fact that the work should be carried out at Korsvägen. Whatever the employee chooses to do constitutes the work,” reads the job description. The employee can also choose how publicly visible or anonymous they would like to be while on the clock.

So you could become a full-time, paid writer.  Or a full-time, paid thinker / sleeper / daydreamer.  Or a full-time, paid pom-pom-animal-creator / Cheerio-necklace-maker / Barbie-hair-cutter.  Or, I guess, you could take your current job if it’s portable and collect a double salary doing your position in a train station.

It’s really brilliant, and I love this quote: “As Gothenburg’s working class finds itself marginalized, Goldin and Senneby see a job that gives total control to the worker as an act of economic imagination.”  In other words, there is a problem, so let’s see how people solve it.  How do they create work for themselves?  And does this work benefit society as a whole?  Just the individual?

What would you do if you got the position?