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The Hobbit is 80 years old.  I’m not sure why that’s remarkable except that the books stand outside of time since they’re set in a fictional world.  (Well, fictional to YOU.  The Shire is totally real to ME.)  No calling cards or gas-guzzling cars or bell bottoms to place it in an era.  How many pieces of writing can say that?  That they feel as relevant and timely now as they did when they were written?

I am admittedly more in love with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I have a soft, mushy spot in my heart for The Hobbit.  I remember taking out the tape recorder when my brother was little and recording him reading aloud from The Hobbit just because I thought it was an important thing to note.  A person’s first reading of The Hobbit.

Tolkien’s books are books I turn to when I am stressed, and maybe it is because of the reason the Atlantic author gives for why his books still important:

In a world today where nuclear doom—for which The Ring can be read as a metaphor—hangs over every country, where efforts to work for common good seem to crumble, and where inequality and hegemony seem likely to persist in perpetuity, perhaps those quaint values are more crucial now than ever.

Or maybe it’s because when the world looks its bleakest — when people look their bleakest — his books are a reminder that there is good out there and that you usually stumble upon it if you allow yourself to get mixed up with the world around you.

Happy birthday, Hobbit.

While I don’t talk about myself in third person, I do talk to myself, so it was a relief to read this article and learn that I’m kind of doing it right.  Because to talk to yourself, you need to enter that third-person space and use your own name to ask yourself a question.  So I do that.  To myself.  Just not in front of other people.

I am my own best therapist.  I mean, yes, I also suck as a conversation partner, constantly berating myself as myself.  (So I guess I’m missing out on the de-stressing side of things.)  But that’s not the point.  The point is me.  In a conversation.  With myself.

99% of the time I don’t speak the words aloud.  That’s the convenient part about having a conversation with yourself.  It can be private; communicated from one part of the brain to another with nothing escaping into the outside world.  You ask yourself a question.  And you answer the question.  And the only thing the other people in the room observe is a somewhat vacant expression on my face.

Though I never speak aloud in third person because that would annoy the crap out of me if it occurred on an on-going basis.  But in my head?  Totally okay.

Do you talk to yourself?

This is it. The last thought of four thoughts that came out of reading Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays. You can go backwards to the first thought or second thought or the third thought, even if you haven’t read the book because these thoughts aren’t tied to the text but rather float above the page. In other words, reading these posts will not ruin the book, and at the same time, they’re not (I think) confusing.

This is the final thought.

A few years ago, we took the kids to a reunion.  While we were there, we were talking with a friend who was meeting the twins for the first time, and he told them that we had been super cool back in our 20s.  The kids looked at him, dubiously.

I thought about that moment while I was reading Chapter 13, page 35:

When you’re young, you think of your parents with the simplest adjectives. As you get older, you add more adjectives and notice some of them contradict each other. He’s tall. He’s tall and strong. He’s tall and strong and smart. He’s tall and strong and smart but busy. He’s tall and strong and smart but busy and aloof and judgmental. She’s safe. She’s safe and kind. She’s safe and kind and caring. She’s safe and kind and caring but sad. She’s safe and kind and caring but sad and lonely and brittle. Maturity colonizes your adolescent mind, like an ultraviolet photograph of a vast cosmic nebula that turns out, on closer examination, to be a pointillist self-portrait.

I wonder sometimes how the kids will think of us down the road.  Clearly they will not consider us cool.  (Or, if they do consider us cool, it will be in retrospect and not in the moment.)  But what other adjectives will come together to form this nuanced version of what they observed from being the closest people to us?

I mean, we are observing them and describing them, but they will clearly do the same back to us, even if they’re not conscious of it.  While we marvel at them, I am fairly certain that we do not occupy the same mind space and energy in their brain.  That’s natural.  That’s the giving tree nature of this type of relationship.

There are plenty of people that we are close to, who know us in a very different way than our kids will ever know us.  But our kids live in this house.  They see our faults and foibles, or successes and strengths, up close.  So I wonder how that will translate into adjectives down the road.

Your thoughts?

Remember how I told you that I had four thoughts that came out of reading Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays? You can go backwards to the first thought or second thought, even if you haven’t read the book because these thoughts aren’t tied to the text but rather float above the page. In other words, reading these posts will not ruin the book, and at the same time, they’re not (I think) confusing.

This is the third thought.

And it’s actually about thoughts.  Like where thoughts come from.

Sometimes the most amazing idea pops into your head, and you while you’re happy that you had it, it brings with it a certain frustration: why can’t you conjure these great ideas whenever you want (or need) to have one?  Or am I the only one who thinks that?

I think that a lot: with book ideas, with blog post ideas, with solutions to problems.  I feel great in the moment — Yes!  I have something to write about! — but I also feel massively frustrated that those ideas don’t occur to me when I need them.  When I force them.  When I am staring at the screen, feeling the clock ticking.

Mastai tackles this idea in Chapter 75 (all the chapters are very short — only two or three pages sometimes) on page 179,

“Okay,” she says, “but what if every creative idea that someone has is unconsciously borrowed from that person’s experiences in another reality? Maybe all ideas are plagiarized without us knowing it, because they come to us through some cryptic and unprovable reality slippage?”

“Does that mean, like, the version of you that had the idea in the other reality also stole it from another version of you in yet another reality?” I say.

“I don’t know,” she says, “maybe we can only access a limited number of, like, adjacent realities and we’re constantly shoplifting ideas from different versions of our world and mistaking them for our own insights.”

So when you have an idea, you are borrowing it from another version of yourself that exists in another reality.  Except that there is no idea Eve, a version of you that sparks the original idea.  Instead, each version borrows what is commonplace to another version but is mind-blowing in your own reality.  So perhaps MicroblogMonday was mind-blowing (okay, it’s not mind-blowing, but you get the point) in this reality, but I borrowed it from a version of myself in another reality where there is only microblogging, therefore it’s on the same level as cereal or umbrellas — just a thing that we take for granted without considering it too hard.

Your thoughts?

When someone tells me that there is a meeting, I show up for the meeting, which is how I found myself in a school library with two other parents learning about the sex education program at the school.

There are probably many good, individual reasons why people didn’t attend, but collectively, it was a pretty pathetic showing.  3 out of 300?  1% of the parents?

Anyway.

All week I joked about how I had to attend a meeting and learn about sex, and I cannot tell you how many people responded seriously, pointing out that of course I knew about sex because we had two children.  In their mind, sex may not always produce a baby, but babies are always produced through sex.  It meant that I spent a better portion of the week educating people on fertility treatments.

I can’t say they were awkward conversations because the other person usually responded, “Oh!  I didn’t think about that.”  But it was just eye opening that regardless of how much the media covers the topic, regardless of how often it appears in People magazine or the New York Times, people still make the assumption that children come from sex.