Tag Archives: book reviews

In Sickness and in Health

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Shout out to Redmond, WA and Hong Kong for the recent ever-so kind and encouraging words. Words that have inspired me to share this post from the other blog writing I’m doing just for friends of Lynn interested in knowing how she’s doing.

Just as there are two distinct Lynn MSA stories to tell, there are two distinct ones that I could tell about myself as primary caregiver.

When you tell your own story, you run the risk of making yourself into a hero. Of emphasizing all that’s admirable and slighting the inevitable messiness and selfishness. This story is hella complex with contrasting personal histories all mixed together with psychology, mental health challenges, emotion, and spirituality.

Thus, the Reader’s Digest version.

Lynn’s predicament is way, way worse than mine, but I’m as unhappy as I’ve ever been. Lynn’s only advantage is that her challenges are obvious to the steady stream of people who visit. People mostly look past me, assuming I’m fine, which I try telling myself I am.

But that’s bullshit. I’ve never experienced anything remotely this challenging. And I don’t feel like I can tell the whole story to anyone because who would have the capacity for the whole damn thing? Simpler to say “fine”, “okay”, “hanging in”, “coping”, “keeping my head just above the water”. I’m a five tool player when it comes to keeping people at a safe distance.*

The sad fact of the matter is I have had to sacrifice everything that brings me joy, especially social connections, in service of Lynn’s daily needs. I have been housebound for exactly a year now. Except for a daily shortish run, ride, or swim. Without those physical activities, I don’t know where I’d be.

I also don’t know where I’d be without our two health care assistants, my two daughters, and Lynn’s closest friends who keep showing up for her, and by extension, our family. People keep making meals for us even without the Meal Train. People are praying for us and sustaining us with flowers, fellowship, and love.

Still, I recently told Lynn I don’t know how long I can carry my half. And feeling abandoned just at the idea of some alternative arrangement, she broke down. And for now, to make a very hard thing even harder, things suck between us.

Hearts will soften and things will improve. They always do. But this challenge will not lessen. I feel overwhelmed almost all the time. I am no match for this relentless disease. But doing the best I can for her. Today at least.

Postscript: I have caught a second, or is it third, or fourth, or fifth wind? And hearts have softened and we are back on track. For now.

*a baseball concept for a player that excels in all five key areas: hitting for average, hitting for power, running speed, fielding ability, and throwing arm strength

Down Goes Bolton!

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If this book review of John Bolton’s tell all was a fight, a ref would’ve stopped it in the early paragraphs.

Early in my academic career, I wrote a lot of book reviews. Overtime, I only agreed to review books that I liked since telling people not to read a particular book didn’t feel like a constructive use of time.

Fortunately, Jennifer Szalai of The New York Times does not share my philosophy.

Her take-down of Bolton is exquisite. Her intro tweet to her review is an appetizer of sort:

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The highlights, or if you’re John Bolton, lowlights:

“The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged.”

Szalai on Bolton’s impeachment dodge:

“‘Had I testified,’ Bolton intones, ‘I am convinced, given the environment then existing because of the House’s impeachment malpractice, that it would have made no significant difference in the Senate outcome.’ It’s a self-righteous and self-serving sort of fatalism that sounds remarkably similar to the explanation he gave years ago for preemptively signing up for the National Guard in 1970 and thereby avoiding service in Vietnam. ‘Dying for your country was one thing,’ he wrote in his 2007 book ‘Surrender Is Not an Option’, ‘but dying to gain territory that antiwar forces in Congress would simply return to the enemy seemed ludicrous to me.'”

The finishing touch:

“When it comes to Bolton’s comments on impeachment, the clotted prose, the garbled argument and the sanctimonious defensiveness would seem to indicate some sort of ambivalence on his part — a feeling that he doesn’t seem to have very often. Or maybe it merely reflects an uncomfortable realization that he’s stuck between two incompatible impulses: the desire to appear as courageous as those civil servants who bravely risked their careers to testify before the House; and the desire to appease his fellow Republicans, on whom his own fastidiously managed career most certainly depends. It’s a strange experience reading a book that begins with repeated salvos about ‘the intellectually lazy’ by an author who refuses to think through anything very hard himself.”

Szalai with the technical knock out.

Be Less Lonely

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By making time to read. Every day. And not just periodicals, blogs, email messages, Twitter feeds, and Facebook updates. Fiction and non-fiction books.

Bookish people are less lonely because they have an endless supply of friends. With the exception of some especially good long running series, television and film characters usually don’t rise to the same level of friendship as literary ones.

Cleo, an eighth grader at a middle school I’ve been helping out at this year, figured this out about eight years ago. She reads incessantly. Averaging about a book a day. Substantive books typically read by high schoolers. And then she reviews them on her blog, Cleo’s Literary Reviews. Apart from sometimes reading in classes she’s not supposed to, I have no idea how she does it.

Our negative preconceived notions of bookworms as socially stunted people ill-prepared for the “real world” are anachronistic. Cleo likes her school and gets along great with her classmates. She appears imminently happy and has a promising future in the “real world”. Cleo will impress with her vocabulary, imagination, and knowledge of the world.

But the longest lasting gift of reading doesn’t have anything to do with competing in the global economy. Most importantly, Cleo’s happiness won’t fluctuate as wildly with the vagaries of “real life” relationships because she’ll always be buffeted by a steady stream of interesting people, created by an endless army of imaginative authors.