One of the first
things I read this morning was a short blog by an author friend about how she’d
devoted a day to doing the odd details that often slipped through the cracks of
her life. She must have read my mind, because I’d decided to take care of odds
and ends—that stack of papers on the corner of the desk needs sorting, and
there are odd bits of paper and notes scattered everywhere with things for me
to do.
So I called my
accountant, called the supervisor of the yard guys and then watched with bated
breath while two went on the roof to cut a tree branch that had worked it’s way
around a live power wire. Filed some papers for a possible project on down the
road and wrote a note to an old acquaintance who’d written after she found me
on the Women Writing the West listserv. I had promised to give my suggestions
on another author’s query letter—I was pretty drastic and hope she took it
well. She used way too many adjectives, and I kept thinking, “Just the facts,
ma’am, just the facts.” A synopsis isn’t the place to showcase your writing
style—that can come in the actual manuscript.
I sent several
emails to friends about everything from last night’s supper to an upcoming
gathering to remember a friend who died a couple of months ago. Supper last
night came from Eatzi’s—a sort of cafeteria of prepared foods. Upscale and very
good. Linda came in from Granbury, and we shopped together for supper. But when
I said, “I’ll have a crab cake,” she said, “I will too.” And when I said, “Green
beans, please,” she said, “For me too.” We laughed at what they must have
thought about us. I also bought a Cotswold cheese with chives—new to me and
delicious. The three of us—Jordan joined us—almost ate the whole hunk, so we’ll
have to go back from more. The crab cake was almost pure crab, low on filling,
and that made it delicious.
But a big thing I
did today was to wade through a podcast and a rather long book review friends
had said I “must” read and/or hear. In addition, I found a lengthy excerpt from
a new book on the online weekday newsletter, Wake Up to Politics. If you don’t
know it, do look it up. The excerpt is from The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For,
by Charlotte Alter (no relation, but I’d sure claim her). The book appears to
be about the changes millennials will bring to our culture and our politics,
but in the quoted section, called “The Last Dinosaurs,” she makes some amazing
points: Google only launched in 1998; Wikipedia came along in 2001, and the
iPhone in 2007. Those social media changes have had an enormous impact on us in
a relatively short time. By contrast, the telephone was not in common use until
almost seventy-five years after its introduction, and both radio and TV were
slow to be found in most households. Millennials are the first generation who
never knew anything but this digital world.
The other book that
impressed me was Why We Are So Polarized by Ezra Klein. Klein points out
that these days few people vote a split ticket—we are less tied to a candidate
than to the party. And criticism of our party’s positions doesn’t sway us—we just
look for ways to validate our opinions. I confess that I keep thinking that if
I can just present the inescapable facts, trumpers will see that he is a thug
and a criminal without knowledge and in mental health trouble. I know it really
just makes them dig their heels in deeper, but I can’t give it up. The other
thing he says is that as our country grows more diverse, representation will
grow even less inclusive. Thirty per cent of the population, in certain states
with heavy electoral count, will elect the president. It’s a lesson trump
learned well in 2016. And what, to me, Klein was basically saying, is that the
Constitution as written may not work in this bright new world. He made me
re-examine a position that I had denounced as heresy, especially when it came
from trump.
All this was heavy
reading, but it sure made for an interesting day. Oh, and there was a podcast
from “Pod Save America,” which pointed out that Tuesday evening, after the
debate, some wag edited the Wikipedia entry on Mike Bloomberg to show his date
of death as 02/18/2020. Cause of death? Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Sleep well in
these troubled times.
