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In my other writing life, I blog about creative solutions to difficult problems.
In my latest post for Applied Grace, I suggest some basic changes that could improve care dramatically for all mental health patients: A Simple Mental Health Protocol Whose Time is Long Overdue.
When I look over the books I have bought in the last year, it seems that none of them are intended for readers over the age of twelve. From Andrew Lang’s Red, Green, and VioletFairy Books, to Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, to C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there is much in the way of good reading, but little in the way of reading for the post-pubescent. It has gotten so that when I browse in the adult section of a bookstore, it is more out of a sense of duty and obligation than out of interest. My real love is children’s books.
Sometimes I have theorized that my unusual addiction to kiddie lit is the result of some strange psychological quirk, but if so, I’d rather stay abnormal for the rest of my life than lose this love. Children’s books are many things to me. They comfort me, they educate me, and they are constant, long-abiding companions. Whenever I travel, it is a children’s book that accompanies me on the journey, and helps to make it a journey for the spirit as well as for the body.
Many people think that if a book is written for children, it is therefore light and unimportant, but I find the opposite to be true. As Madeleine L’Engle has said, children need life’s great imponderables explained just as much as the rest of us — and what’s more, they need them explained clearly and simply enough that they can understand them. The result is often books such as Madeleine L’Engles A Ring of Endless Light or Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, both of which deal with death, life, and hope. These books, and many others like them, go through a process not unlike fruits being made into jam; they are boiled and condensed and stirred until only the sweet essence remains. These books are not lesser versions of adult books; they are greater.
Each time I reread a book from my childhood, I am at a different point in my life, and I read it with new insight and a new perspective . Over the years, this effect has become cumulative, and when I read a book which I’ve read many times before, I also remember all the different incarnations of myself that have read it in the past. Just as children’s books are written in different levels and layers for their different audiences, so my own readings become multilayered, as rereading a book allows me to look through all the different layers of Me’s that I have been. As I grow, these books and these stories grow with me. They have guided me through my childhood and adolescence; I look forward to many years of their teaching me how to live as an adult, while always striving for the clarity to see the world through a child’s eyes.
~1997~
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A few years ago, I was on a pseudo-date,** and we went to a literary event down at the UT campus. Halfway through the evening, a fancy prizewinning author ascended the stage to torture us with awful prose:
“Blah blah blah blah Linear B. Blah blah blah The Crimean War. As Aristotle says, blah blah blah Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle blah blah blah.” ***
This went on for about 20 minutes, and the whole thing sounded like one of those Boldface Names columns, except instead of dropping famous names, the guy was dropping pretentious intellectual references. The writing was boring and awful, while the string of unnecessarily obscure topics started to make me feel anxious, like I might have to take a final exam before intermission.
I wondered, “How on earth is This Man a famous writer?”
But I finally figured it out: if you want to be hailed as a genius, all you have to do is write a long, turgid, impenetable work. Critics will be afraid of the references they don’t understand, and so to avoid looking stupid, they’ll just praise it in self-defense.
This is how bad novels become “critical masterpieces.” Fear.
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**One of those, “I don’t get it — is this a date, or what?” things.
***For the record, I do know what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is – or at least, I know it cocktail-party-well, which is all that’s important.
…What are yours?
You can sharply cut benefits and protections for people, as long as you announce that you’re doing it to strike a blow for individuality.
Even internet businesses need to “turn” a “profit.”
Rich people often hold grudges against their friends who are even more rich.
When things are hard for you, almost all of the people whom you think of as your friends will stop taking your calls.
When things are great for you, people whom you barely know will announce all the details of your close, intimate friendship.
A lot of those American flags we bought after 9/11 were made in China.
It turns out that gutting jobs and exporting factories overseas does not make average Americans richer.
If there is a disaster, you should start worrying precisely at the moment when they say, “There is nothing to worry about.” (Corollary: If they say, “It’s bad, but it’s not as bad as x,” that means, “It’s probably worse than x.”)
No one knows how to make a living in the music industry anymore.
Local video stores killed movie theatres. Blockbuster killed local video stores. Netflix killed Blockbuster. Chips in your head with on-demand movies will kill Netflix.
A whole lot of jobs that existed in my youth are now relics of a bygone age. Ditto the phrase,”I’m not going to answer the phone, because we just sat down to dinner.”
We have created a world in which no one ever has to be alone with their own thoughts.
Computers, which are supposed to be predictable, aren’t.
Everybody hopes that maybe mortality only happens to other people.
It turns out that real estate is not always a sure thing.
Once someone uses the phrase “The New Normal,” you’re at the top of the market.
Once someone says, “Only an idiot would buy, everybody knows that,” it’s time to buy.
When one party rewrites the rules to give themselves more power, the other party may protest. But they won’t change the rules back when they get back in power.
Most social communications innovations of the last 20 years have been made by socially awkward people who hate to communicate.
Smart phones have made rudeness socially acceptable.
People will put up with anything, as long as their illusions are maintained.
Republicans are evil, but at least they know what to do with power when they get it.
Republicans have struck a deal with frustrated white men: If you let corporations make you suffer, we’ll make sure that women and minorities suffer even more.
It turns out a lot of people don’t mind suffering, as long as they can make sure that other people are suffering even more.
Lying about wars, intelligence failures, or budgets will not get you kicked out of office.
Lying about sex will.
Life is fundamentally better for gay Americans than it used to be, although there’s still a long way to go.
A lot of technological advances protect us from the hell of other people, but they also prevent us from making real connections.
Once I was crying for 4 months straight, and I stopped once I got a B12 shot. It turns out that I needed something very badly in my life, and that something was not “a more positive attitude.”
Weather changes without notice, and so do emotions. The world is not the weather, and the soul is not the emotions.
People are still much more sympathetic towards physical illnesses than they are toward mental illnesses, even though most mental illnesses are physical in origin.
If someone you know is suffering, and you don’t give them compassionate sympathy, but instead advise them to “visualize,” you will go to a Special Hell.
This Special Hell is filled with burning, remaindered copies of The Secret. There is nothing else to read.
When people tell you that they never used to like you back in the past, do not be fooled. They are still insulting you in the present.
Sometimes, it can feel confusing to know who is really your friend. But it’s really quite simple. If someone is your friend, you feel better after you see them. If they’re not your friend, you feel worse.
This is also a good way to know whether you should keep dating someone.
A lot of people have been very fortunate in their life, and they think it’s because they’re nice people who work hard. They don’t realize that they are only able to be nice and work hard because they have been fortunate.
I remember That Guy.
When I first started using email, there was always One Guy who insisted on emailing you, even if you were across the room. And when I graduated to the work world, there was that guy who cut you off mid-sentence if you went to talk to him.
“…Bill, I-”
“-Just email me.”
Then, we had a name for this behavior: rudeness.
Now, we don’t have a name for it — because it’s how everybody acts.
Insanely rude behavior has become socially acceptable, in just 10 years.
Not. Progress.
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There have always been people who love machines and hate people. And they think, “If only someone could invent a way to Obtain Information from people without all this pesky inefficient social interaction,” and then they go invent something in their basement rather than, say, deciding to Grow as a Person.
So now, what do we do? Now that NeverTalkToAnotherHumanAgain.Com has just gained a billion users?
The platforms for our social lives are now defined by the anti-social.
Imagine if every bacon double-cheeseburger had to be approved by a Rabbi for deliciousness. It wouldn’t work very well, would it?
It’s like that.
Different stages in life have their own times, and so do different kinds of abilities. Athletes peak young. Dancers peak young. Models peak young.
Singers peak old.
In the classical world, a “young singer” is any singer under the age of 40. A woman’s singing voice doesn’t even finish developing until she’s about 35, and a man’s develops a little earlier, but still in the late 20’s/early 30’s range.** So the 30’s aren’t even the peak — they’re just the beginning of the peak.
Being a singer is like this: let’s say you have an instrument, and you play it all the time. But every once in a while they take it away, raise the bridge, and put different gauge strings on it. Or you drop it, they fix it, and when they give it back, now it’s painted blue. And if you’re sick, or you’re in a bad mood, or you’ve stayed up too late, your instrument now plays only in E flat for the next week.
After you’ve been playing your instrument for years, you find that all these tiny incremental changes have made a big change overall. All of these adjustments — all of this living — have put more power, more strength, and more soul into your instrument than you ever dreamed of.
And maybe you find that, all this time, you thought you were playing a violin, but your instrument seems to have become a sitar. Or a trombone. Or whatever.
And, coincidentally, that thing it became? Secretly, that is the instrument you always wanted all along.
I believe that it takes 30-plus years for our bodies to begin to find our voices because that’s how long it takes our hearts to begin to resonate and sing at their true frequencies. For most of us, we spend years wandering in the dark, saying things we don’t believe, giving and taking disrespect, and trying to figure out who we really are and what we really want to say. It is not until well into adulthood (if then) that the dross begins to fall away to reveal hints of the gold underneath. Why then should our singing be any different?
The song makes the singer just as much as the singer makes the song.
Story: A few years ago, after years of singing with a beautiful, clear, church-choir soprano, I came out with a blues-mama belt straight from my gut. I was 32 years old, I had been singing regularly for decades — and I had never heard this voice come out of me before. The song came out when my heart was ready, and my voice came out to welcome the song.
Story: Several years ago, when I was having vocal problems, I found that if I said something I didn’t really mean (like “yes” instead of “no”), my throat tightened up and my problems got worse. For the sake of my singing voice, I had to truly think about my speech. I had to make sure that my voice was aligned with my heart.
Story: Around about the same time, I noticed that I could only sing without discomfort in Spanish! And then I realized that losing my ‘voice’ was not a new experience: when I was 4, my family moved from Spain to the U.S., and the other children teased me so much that I forgot Spanish. Losing my first language was my original sin, learning it again was my journey, and singing in it now — is redemption.
So: good luck to everyone. May you all make friends with yourself on the continuing journey to your heart’s true voice.
Here’s the thing: whenever some guy tries to defend the double standard, he’ll go off on some weird pseudo-scientific diatribe about how “evolution” has made men “hard-wired” to be more promiscuous, and it’s just “natural” and “instinctive.”
But.
Whenever things really are natural and instinctive , we don’t have to debate them.
No one has ever had to go up to a group of teenagers, and say, “Look, you might consider spending some time thinking about the opposite sex, because evolutionarily you are very fertile right now.”
No…it just happens, because it’s natural.
The double standard is a source of tension because women find it unfair. Which means they care about it, because they have the same desires as men. If they didn’t, then the double standard would be unfair in principal, but irrelevant in practice. Like a Three Stooges Film Festival that didn’t admit women.
Also, there are 6 billion people in the world. That’s a lot of sexytimes. Since childbirth is excruciating and can kill you, why on earth would women risk all that if sex were zero fun?
And finally…if men are supposed to be naturally promiscuous, and women naturally monogamous…then who exactly are these guys having sex *with*?
Ok. I’m done.
A funny thing happened to me last year.
I was having a down week. The kind of week where you think, “I know! I’ll {insert bad idea here}! It’ll be great!”
At some point during this week — a dank, depressing fall week — I got this crazy idea to try to call my ex-boyfriend. We had dated for 6 months in Seattle, and I was a long time getting over him.
I’ll call him Fred. Fred had a lot good qualities. He was, for example, helpful. If you’re moving, he’s your guy. Need a ride somewhere? Ditto. He was not, however, the most supportive guy on earth. Once, after I played at an open mic, he said, “A little flat, but overall, not bad…”
I later explained to him that this did not really work for me.
Fred was getting over a long-term relationship in which each partner had been quite critical of the other. He had improved. He had gone from massively shooting down new ideas to minimally shooting down new ideas. Or maybe just refraining from most comment.
This was progress, I realized. But after the relationship ended, I also realized, Not Good Enough. Towards the end of our run, for example, I played a show — a revue called 12 Minutes Max. 2 hours of mostly adequate performances, and a few good ones. I was the best one there; that’s why they had me close.
Fred sat through 2 nights of this to support me. But then he ruined it all in one instant. As patrons of the sold-out show came to praise me and ask for my autograph, Fred said, “Good job! You have this…sort of…self-deprecating thing that people seem to really like for some reason!”
…that people seem to really like for some reason?
It was after we broke up that I decided; in the future, all men I date must think I am a fabulous singer and performer. None of this, “Well, he’s so supportive in other ways…” — no. This is who I am; if you are into me, you must be into what I do.
And you know what? The guys I’ve dated seriously since then — they have thought I was fabulous. So there.
Anyways. In spite of my epiphanies, progress, etc. etc., once in a while I still missed Fred. Good, old, critical Fred, who found fault whenever I said something cute, witty, or funny.
So, one evening when I felt particularly weak-willed, I called up Seattle’s information number and asked for Fred Bissett. Not that common a name. They found one, and suddenly, there he was, picking up the phone. He answered. I felt scared. “Fred? Hi! It’s..um…Sofia! I know this is sort of out of the blue, but I just wanted to call and say hi…if it’s a good time…is it a good time?”
He said yes. In fact, he sounded pretty happy to hear from me. I was surprised. I asked him what he’d been up to lately. He said, “No…I want to hear about you.”
Well, ok! I took a deep breath. I told him about Austin, about starting my career as a singer-songwriter. About all the experiences I’d had. Whenever I told him something, he would always say, “Really! Wow! That is *so* interesting!”
I was surprised. This was a new Fred. His voice sounded pretty much the same, but there was a warmth, and a sense of love, that hadn’t been there before. He seemed so eager to hear details of my life. Every time I told him an anecdote, he said, with genuine surprise and pleasure, “You know, I’ve never heard it said just that way before.”
I continued on. I told him about my activism, about volunteering for musical events that supported peace movements in Austin. I told him about going to Molly Ivins’ funeral. Each time, instead of talking about himself, he asked me, with eagerness, to continue.
I was amazed. It was like a whole new Fred! In fact, I was falling for him a little bit over the phone. I thought, he must have had some kind of enormous shift in his life, to be acting like this. Things could never have worked out with the old Fred…but this man . . . hrmm.
Finally, after about 15 minutes, I insisted that Fred tell me about his life.
“Well, ” he began. “I’m a Jungian therapist.” I was shocked, but before I could say anything, he continued: “And I have to confess; I know a lot of Sofia’s. When you first called, I thought you were someone else. But I think . . . I think you have the wrong Fred Bissett.”
What?!? I was absolutely perplexed. How could this be? I asked him — why did you . . . talk to me for so long?
“Well, to be honest,” he said, “you’re just so interesting to talk to! You have this…charming, interesting way of speaking. And all these unusual observations that I’ve never really heard expressed just that way before. And . . . yes, it’s just a genuine pleasure talking with you! . . . I hope you find your Fred. Because I tell you one thing: he’s missing out!”
I hung up the phone, in awe.
I had found the right Fred, after all.
A few months ago, I was sitting at a cafe, and met a young woman. She was about 19 or 20, and she had two children. They were currently with their father, so she was getting a lovely bit of time to herself.
This young woman seemed very calm, and was obviously a good mother. She was speaking very eloquently about her children, what they needed at each stage of development, etc. Yet, inside of me, I had this voice in my head: Two children by the age of 19? Not by accident, but by choice? She’s doing it wrong, she’s a Bad Mother.
I thought about that judgment. I’ve spent a lot of time in very judgmental environments: New York City, young professionals, Harvard students and Harvard graduates — these are not a live-and-let-live kind of people. There are Rules for things, and right and wrong. So let’s take a peek at the conversation I had in my head:
——
19 with 2 children? How irresponsible. What a bad choice. And she seems like she doesn’t have a lot money, either. Sure, she’s sweet and loving to her children, but how long will that last, once economic reality sets in?
What should she have done instead?
Well, someone in her position should obviously wait. She should go to college. Graduate school.
Will that be good enough?
No! Graduate school is no time to have a child! She needs to embark on a career! She needs to make a living! So that she can provide her children with everything they need!
Well, if she’s in such a high-powered career, it will take her a long time to get established. When should she have kids?
Probably not until she’s 35 or 40.
But that’s at the end of a woman’s fertility cycle. She might have problems, or she might even be infertile!
There are new technologies. And she can always adopt.
And once she has her kids, how will she possibly be able to take time off to raise them?
She can take a few months off. Maybe get her hours reduced to only 40. But really, she’ll need to hire some help. That’s just one of the many perks of earning a good salary!
In other words, she’ll pay a nanny to raise her children for her, because she’s too busy to do it herself. Tell me, what kind of nanny should she get?
Well, she’ll need someone young…so that she has the energy to run around after little babies. And someone who has a calm temperament — and is very interested in the children’s welfare. Then, of course, there’s the question of cost…much as we’d like it to be otherwise, we can’t really pay a Nanny a whole lot of money. So she’d probably have to be someone from a lower economic level…
——
After going through this whole Q&A session in my head, I realized that society judges poor young women when they dare to raise their own children. But it doesn’t judge those same poor women when they’re working as nannies, and raising rich women’s children.
The whole area of career and childcare is so messed up in America. I know I’ve had a feeling of paralysis when I think about career, much of my adult life. Part of this is because it is extremely hard to keep on in your career once you have a child. Why — for example — go to law school, work hard, start a career as a lawyer…only to find, 5 years into your career, that you have to make a humongous, life-changing choice, that you want to stay home with your baby for a few years? That you might be throwing your career away forever?
In this situation, looking ahead to the future which includes motherhood, there’s the “better not to really try in the first place” option. We never talk about that. We discuss — occasionally — the women who face obstacles in terms of combining career and family. But we never talk about the women who are sure they want kids, and quietly take less career-oriented, dead-end jobs, for their whole adult lives, because they’ll just have to quit them eventually anyways, and why bother?
Something’s got to change.
Radio Sof 