Blue-Footed Musings

For a while it seemed like book critics everywhere were talking about On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. I am a sci-fi fan, and I never met a time-travel story that didn’t entertain me in some way, so I was an easy sell.

In this story, bookseller Tara Selter suddenly finds herself repeating a day over and over again, a la Groundhog Day, except that it’s November 18th and she is not Bill Murray. She doesn’t know how she became stuck in this day or how to escape. She is away from home when it happens. When she returns home and tells her husband, he believes her. Every day when she awakes, she has to explain it to him again, because only she remembers the events from the day before. Imagine being to so fortunate as to be married to someone who believes you without question, only to feel them slipping farther and farther away from you as your days and theirs do not align. She explores the day as if it were a place. She learns the weather’s daily patterns, the day’s sounds and its silences. It is all intensely, hypnotically repetitive.

Why does does this lonely, introspective book feel so suited to the present time? Perhaps for some of us it’s feeling like we are quietly trying to exist in the spaces between crises, unsure how we got into this predicament, desperately struggling to get back to normalcy but unable to, and ultimately focusing on whatever joy we might be able to salvage from the situation. We may not have Tara’s specific problem, but we understand what she’s going through.

Currently Reading: I’ve finished volumes 1-3 of On the Calculation of Volume and have started on the 4th. I think I might take a break from the series and read something else for a while, but I’m not sure what. It’s so hard to find books that keep my attention, and these days I tend to bail on a book if it heads in a direction that I don’t like. My emotional state is such that I dare not to read anything disturbing. Even fictional trauma is too much to manage now.

This week I started my first work project composed primarily of recycled material. It’s a big change, and not a good one. To be clear, I don’t entirely disagree with the premise of using old copy. Some parts of the projects are suited to that, and if I’d had my way we would have switched to recycled material for those sections eons ago. I wasn’t allowed to make that call because a certain someone always stood in the way. I believe his many bad decisions over the last three decades are part of why were are where we are now. This adds a dash of resentment to the stew of sadness, frustration, and worry roiling in my stomach.

It was an unpleasant week, and it doesn’t bode well for my long-term job satisfaction. I’m being severely restricted in what I’m allowed to edit, and the new rules are in many cases the opposite of the old. I’m not always sure when I’m allowed to intervene, so I’ve been running everything past my boss. I feel like I’m asking her, “Please, may I do my job?” It’s ridiculous. But all of my coworkers have done the same, so at least I’m in good company.

Another thing my coworkers have all done is to choose pseudonyms for themselves. I get it now. I’ll be choosing one, too. If I’m not allowed to edit the work to my standards then it isn’t worthy of my name.

Everything in this country has gotten extremely expensive: housing, food, childcare, home and auto insurance, health insurance, healthcare, electricity, education, cars, etc. Each of these things has come to feel like a burden, and this has been going on for a long time. But it’s only now that gasoline prices are high that people are like, “Hey, this is too much!” Americans are content, it seems, to live in a totally rigged system and suffer the continuous depredations of the uber wealthy as long as gas is cheap. They probably wouldn’t even care about the war in Iran if it weren’t making gas prices rise. Their single-mindedness is baffling. I have read articles that attempt to explain it, and I still don’t really understand. I doubt I ever will.

I read a piece of advice the other day. It said, “Don’t share your despair.” Once upon a time I might have agreed, but I don’t know how to keep the despair inside anymore. It is too massive to be contained. And I don’t know how anyone can look upon the world as it is now and not feel despair.

So let us all share our despair, and if it’s true that misery loves company, then we shall all be good company.

But let us also share the bits of joy that we have gleaned, the tiny rays of hope, the flashes of beauty. The despair must be acknowledged, but the joy sustains us.

I got a free 7-day trial of BritBox because I thought that The Other Bennet Sister looked interesting. I should have investigated first, though, because only 5 of the 10 episodes had been released at that point. I watched all five and then waited impatiently for the 6th episode, then the 7th, and now I’m waiting for the 8th. The show feels like an extension of the Ehle/Firth version of Pride and Prejudice (one of the best things ever made for TV) and consequently I can’t help but like it. My only major complaint is the cliffhangers. I hate being manipulated that way almost as much as I hate waiting to find out what happens next.

While sorting through a stack of paper I found a sticker that said, “I VOTED BY MAIL.” The sticker must date to the Covid era because that’s the only time I ever voted by mail. The sticker was a throwaway item then, but somehow it survived, and it seems more meaningful now that the right to vote by mail is under fire. I stuck the sticker to my computer as a symbol of hope and defiance.

Every day there are news articles about terrible things happening or being done in the world. At some point I started bookmarking those articles in my web browser. Initially it was so I’d have a list handy if anyone ever asked me for specific examples of what I considered to be so terrible. Now, any time a news story starts to upset me, I immediately bookmark it and close the browser tab. It’s a coping strategy for keeping myself from being consumed by fury and grief. My bookmarks, once home to my list of grievances, have become more like an oubliette, a prison for the things I want to forget.

Last week each of my children got an award at school. Livia won an award for French. Marshall got a college book award, for which we had to attend an awards ceremony. The ceremony went on far too long, we all agreed afterward, but I’m glad we were there. He didn’t apply for the award, so he could only have gotten it by recommendation. I’m happy to know that Marshall has at least one teaching advocating for him. And I’m proud of both children for doing so well in school this year.

I recently saw an article ranking each U.S. state on the percentage of residents with BAs. It’s interesting. I grew up in the state ranked 7th, went to college in the state ranked 1st (48.3% of MA residents have a BA!), and currently live in the state ranked 14th. I have a BA, as do many of my friends and family members. To me, college is a rite of passage and I expect that both of my children will go. But it is clear that people in some states (notably West Virginia, which ranked 50th) either have less access to higher education and/or value it differently. And news reports suggest that attitudes toward higher education have begun to sour, even in states such as MA, partly due to the exorbitant cost of a four-year degree and the ensuing student debt, partly due to politics. Each year’s batch of high-school graduates will be smaller now (the so-called “demographic cliff”). And then there’s AI stealing away so many of the jobs to which college grads once aspired. All of this will likely lead to fewer college students, more colleges going out of business, and a less educated populace. I wonder how each state’s BA percentages will change in the coming years.

• I’m not really the schadenfreude type, except those rare occasions when a certain malicious person gets mad over having been thwarted. That always brings a smile to my face. Too bad it doesn’t happen more often.
• I have now looked at roughly a million lake houses and spent more time on Zillow than it took to build the Panama Canal. Livia says I belong on My Strange Addiction.
• Yesterday afternoon there was a sudden BOOM that shook the entire house. My husband and I were so surprised that we each went looking for the other so that we could talk about it. He thought a tree must have fallen. I thought it was thunder. We looked outside. Nothing seemed amiss. So we went our separate ways again and forgot about it. Later I noticed a news update on my phone mentioning a loud boom. So I looked it up and OMG it was caused by a meteor!!! How crazy is that?