I have a random-quote feature on my blog. Most people who have been to my site have probably never noticed it. I don’t add to the quotation database often, I rarely think of it, and I don’t remember everything I’ve added. So, every once in a while, I see a quote on my own blog that hits me in a hard way, like this one:
There is a word in Russian that refers to refugees and people who run: bezhentsy. This applies to people who are running from the bullets, from the bombs, in this war. There are some Russians — dancers and maybe athletes — who run more gracefully than others. In my very small way, I am trying to support them. In the end, we all run from somebody.
Earlier this year, when my daughter was cutting her birthday cake, she asked me how big I wanted my slice to be. I told her to give me a small one. My husband said the same, adding, “When you get older, you lose your cake stomach.” Then, as he was loading ice cream on top of his slice of cake, Livia quipped, “So you lose your cake stomach, but not your ice cream stomach, eh?”
For Christmas I received a daily desk calendar with so-called “words from the wise” (quotes by famous people). One morning I was surprised to see that the day’s calendar page had writing on it. It said, “FU Joyce Brothers! FU!” Oh, my. I wondered what Joyce Brothers could possibly have said to prompt such a reaction.
Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.
Dr. Joyce Brothers
Hmm. That doesn’t seem so bad. There’s nothing wrong with positive thinking.
But, the phrasing also implies that failure is brought on by failing to think of oneself as a success. Could that be it? I don’t know. I often find that my logic is not the same as other people’s logic, and I can’t assume that I’ve understood the quote in the same way as others. Also, for all I know, the angry response was to Joyce Brothers herself, not to that particular quote. Maybe she was, in her own way, as bad as certain other famous TV doctors whom we know to be quacks and snake-oil salesmen. So I hope that the mystery vandal will read my post and comment to let me know exactly what the issue was, because I’m curious.
I have a new bad habit: every time I reach down to the floor to grab something or stand up from a seated position, I make a noise that’s anywhere from a gasp to a groan. I can’t seem to stop myself. And it’s so annoying, because it’s not like these activities are really taking any great effort. So why do I make these noises?
Ever since I was a child and learned the song “Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch,” I’ve been curious about pawpaws.
Pawpaw fruit is notoriously delicate and ephemeral, so unless you live close to where pawpaws grow, you don’t get to have any. As a lifelong New Englander, I’d resigned myself to never tasting a pawpaw unless I happened to visit the South at the right time of year. Then I found out that there was a farm in Rhode Island that not only grew them, but also sold them. For years, I was eager to get my paws on some, and in the early fall of 2024, I finally did.
Rocky Point Farm in Warwick, Rhode Island is an urban farm, the access point hidden away on a residential street. They sell pawpaws only a few days of the week in mid-September and through October. You have to show up early to get in line, because they sell out within twenty minutes, even though they limit the amount that people are allowed to buy.
Luckily there were some people, but not a lot, already in line when we arrived. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have known where to go. Standing with these random people in this weird location and then paying in cash for a little stash of fresh and frozen pawpaws, it was almost like joining a secret society (“or a cult,” my husband added when I said as much). As the other people drove away with their pawpaws, my husband also joked about us clearly not fitting in well, because everyone else had an electric car.
Those pawpaws cost a pretty penny, I tell you, but they filled the car with the most heavenly smell. Since we were near the ocean, we decided to stop at a seafood restaurant and enjoy a nice dinner together. We didn’t look closely at the fruit until we got home, at which time we were surprised to see that some of the pawpaws were downright black in spots. Whether they’d been that way at the time of purchase or whether they’d turned black during the couple of intervening hours, we’re not sure, but it was clear that they were already degrading and would only get worse. They needed to be eaten or frozen that very night. So we ate a few, and we froze the rest.
People say that the flavor of a pawpaw is like a mix of banana, pineapple, and mango. Our experience was mixed. A couple of the pawpaws were the sweet and custardy treat we’d been told to expect. Yum! Others were mealy. Some had far more seed than flesh. Some were bitter or had a vaguely vomitous aftertaste. Overall, we weren’t sure we liked them very much.
We watched a few YouTube videos about pawpaws afterward, and what we learned is that each pawpaw tree is genetically unique. Some will produce good-tasting fruit and/or fruit with plenty of flesh. Some will produce yucky fruit and/or fruit that’s mostly seeds. So, they’re like apples that way. If you want to be guaranteed good fruit, you need a graft from a tree that produces good fruit. So, perhaps the farm’s pawpaw patch was naturally seeded, and that’s why the fruit quality was so varied.
Someday, after horticulturists have had their way with the pawpaw plant, we may be able to get pawpaws that last longer than a day and that have small seeds and that are consistently tasty. Until that happens, I don’t think I’m going to buy any more pawpaws, but I’m sure glad that my husband and I went on our little pawpaw adventure. It was a fun and informative day.
Last year my husband spotted his first spotted lantern fly. He was across town at the time, nowhere near our property, but it’s only a matter of time before the bugs work their way over here. Related: a couple of weeks ago, I read that emerald ash borers have been discovered in the parkland near our home. I knew they were in town, but I didn’t know how close. I love our ash trees, and I will be so sad if they die. Last time I checked, there were no holes in the bark, but I was looking at eye level and below. Who knows what’s happened since or what’s going on higher up the trunks?
My brain is cruel to me. Not only does it have a propensity for ear worms, but it also latches on to certain ideas and phrases (thought worms?) and then repeats them over and over again. For example, I’ve been studying music theory, and one night before bed I was reading about second inversion triads and their uses. One use is the “cadential 6-4.” My brain latched onto that phrase, and all night my dreams were plagued with references to the cadential 6-4. I slept very poorly. Afterward, I hoped that there might be a bright side–that I wouldn’t soon forget what a cadential 6-4 was–but damned if I could define it for you now!
After the alarm on my alarm clock died, I never replaced the clock. Instead I’ve been using the alarm on my phone. The alarm on my phone also reminds me when to take my medication. The kids and I refer to the bus tracker on my phone every morning before school. The navigation on my phone is better than what I have in my car, so occasionally I use it. I even sometimes solve the NYT puzzles on it. Slowly but surely I am becoming as dependent on my phone as other people are on theirs.
I sometimes feel as I get older that my body is a separate being, complete with its own needs and opinions. It has grown weary of my management style. It has started insisting on doing things its own way, and I am at its mercy. Payback is a bitch.
Another thing about life that seems fundamentally unfair to me is that while our days go more smoothly when they are structured, they also go so much more quickly. That is to say, life is easier when you have a routine and you stick to it. But, as we get older, time seems to move faster, and the generally accepted explanation for this is that we encounter fewer novel experiences as we age. Our days blend in our memories because they are all the same, and as the days blend, time appears to speed up. So, the way to slow time down is to add more novel experiences. But, adding novel experiences is not only difficult (we’ve already done so many of the things that can be done!), but it also makes life more difficult because it’s less routine.
2024 was not a good year. I wrote the preceding sentence and immediately thought to myself, “Have any of the recent years been good?” I doubt I’d describe them as such. But last year was a real doozy in terms of what was happening in the world. Also, it was a hard year for me personally because I was suffering from intense sleep deprivation. Here’s a post (originally written in April of last year) about what it was like.
I don’t sleep well or for long enough. I almost always go to bed later than I ought, because I’m a night owl by nature. It takes me about a half an hour to fall asleep. Staying asleep is a problem, too. Whether it’s because I’m too hot, too cold, something hurts, there’s the slightest noise, my mind won’t shut up, I’m thirsty, gotta pee, or all of the above, I rarely sleep all the way through morning.
Last night I turned off the light at 11:00, then woke up at about 4:40 and was still trying to fall back asleep at 5:40, considered getting up but decided it was better to at least rest, and was drifting in a half-conscious state when the alarm jarred me out of it at 6:20. So, I got about 5.25 hours of sleep plus maybe 40 minutes of semi-sleep, but I need at least 8 hours of actual sleep to feel human.
I hate being this tired. Words stop sounding like words and begin to lose meaning. I have no patience and become irrationally angry at the least provocation. My short-term memory doesn’t function. I’m so distractable that I even get distracted from my distractions. Driving is a nightmarish experience of having to be hypervigilant to compensate for the lack of natural alertness. I try to work, but my brain will not engage. If my mental sharpness were to be described in terms of a tack, it would be the tack that has somehow been completely flattened and is of no use to anyone anymore.
I will spend my evening watching TV, either something I’ve already seen or something so simplistic that it requires not the least bit of thought from me, because that’s all I can handle. I will fritter away hours because I’m incapable of harnessing them for anything useful. The only thing I do well when I’m tired is to dredge up words that I rarely use–a necessity when exhaustion-induced aphasia steals away the ones I’d typically use.
I’m so tired of everyone else’s obsession for perfumes. As sometimes sensitive to smells, it’s annoying that every product in the universe now comes with a noxious cloud of fragrance. Take trash bags, for example. One day I was sorting through a bunch of junk in my office, so I needed a trash bag to put the discards into. But just having the bag in my office made me sneeze. Its fragrance was that strong. And what purpose could all that perfume serve? If I wanted my house scented, I’d scent my house. If my trash stank, I’d put it outside rather than try to cover one smell with another.
When I go walking on library grounds, I often see other hikers and runners on the path. Sometimes I can smell them, too. They leave a trail of laundry scent behind them. I’m not kidding. If I had to be in closer proximity to them, they’d probably make me feel ill. (Counterpoint: There’s a commercial for Downy Unstoppables in which a woman periodically gives her clothes a sniff and each time announces, “Still fresh!” I adore the commercial but can’t imagine ever buying the product.)
And don’t even get me started on scented dishwasher tabs. Like, why in Hell would anyone want their dishes (and consequently their food) to smell like cheap perfume? It boggles my mind, even as it irritates my nose.
I finished my first book of 2025 last month. It was The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake. I started it last year, so clearly my reading pace has not returned anywhere near normal yet. 🙁
In this dark academia novel, six medeians (read: magicians) are given the ultra-rare opportunity to join the Alexandrian Society. The Society guards the Library of Alexandria, which has been hidden away rather than destroyed and is now home to a massive collection of writings on the magical arts. Though six were invited, one will be eliminated before the initiation. In the meantime, the Six live and study magic together, each learning more about their own gifts as well as the powers possessed by the others. Their talents range from the ability to manipulate people’s thoughts to the power to manipulate time and space. As the day of initiation approaches, they discover that the Society has not been entirely open with them.
I liked the book, with caveats. It was hard to get into the story because none of the characters were likeable (some of them might even be considered evil and/or depraved). Though they grew on me somewhat, I felt that the most interesting character was underutilized and that none of the characters had much personal growth over the course of the story. There wasn’t a lot of action, and the ending was tainted by an awkward infodump. I gather that the book was initially self-published. Kudos to the author for getting her book out there and noticed! While the story probably got some editing when it was taken up by a big publisher, I think it needed yet more. (Most books do, and it’s a pity that they don’t get it.) I would consider reading the sequel. However, I have so many books in my house that are waiting to be read, I can’t justify looking elsewhere for reading at the moment.
Currently Reading: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
