I mentioned last week that I had signed up for an 18-day virtual meditation retreat that started on Election Day.
It was the smartest thing I’ve done all year.
I was a little stressed as I watched returns on Election Day itself; I remember 2016 all too well. But on Wednesday, when it started to become obvious that the Biden-Harris team was going to win, I got calm.
And I’ve stayed that way.
It’s not that I’m sanguine about all the challenges ahead. I already sent money to Fair Fight Action for the Georgia Senate runoffs.
I’m worried about a lot of things. The Republicans seem to have become a cult. The moderate Democrats seem to be under the illusion that we can just go back to “normal” even though it’s obvious that ship has sailed.
And while our local races here in Oakland went well — we’re going to have a more progressive city council this time around — that just means that we’ve got a better chance of getting our voices heard. It doesn’t mean we don’t have to work to get something meaningful done.
[Note: Personal political opinion follows. I do not presume to speak for the Treehouse…]
There’s no denying I’ve been breathing easier, and had much more spring in my step, since Biden won Pennsylvania to become president-elect of the United States of America. In fact, I felt an enormous weight lift with that news, a feeling of oppression melt away, an oppression that’s been with me for four year, since the DTs first set in. (Who would have thought that one man could cause so much damage? In 1930’s Germany, sure. But not here. Surely.)
But has the nightmare really ended? DT hangs on, a child gripped by a tantrum; but is it just that? If only. He knows he’s lost—the whole world knows it—and still he continues to raise money, and to sow distrust of democratic elections. Is he planning a coup to stay in office? If you were planning a military coup, what’s the first thing you’d do? Probably remove defense leaders who were resistant to your autocratic authority. Check. Keep the top leaders of your political party in thrall because they fear your displeasure, and get them to act (to their eternal shame) as if nothing of significance had happened on election day. Check. Lie, lie, and lie some more. Check.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 rampages unchecked, and the presidential transition is obstructed, hampering the new administration’s ability to hit the ground running to bring Covid under control. It’s almost as if they want Biden to face the pandemic at its worst, the better to cast blame.
Note my choice of the word “they.” It’s not just DT, it’s the Republican Party (save for a brave few who have spoken up) that’s overwhelmingly complicit in this malevolent charade. It’s disgraceful; it’s unpatriotic; it’s unchristian; it’s treasonous, really; and it’s a very dangerous game they are playing with our democracy. The Cylons could not have done it better.
We may be more dependent on the honor and oath of our military command than we (or I, at any rate) imagined would actually happen in real life. The day may come when the generals will have to say No to their commander-in-chief when he orders them to choose between serving him, and serving the Constitution. I believe they are up to the challenge.
Meanwhile, we the people, if we want our democracy to survive, are going to have to be vigilant, indeed.
Travel back with me to those long-ago pre-Pandemic days when we went out of the house to do… well, everything. My husband, who has an antic sense of humor, got a screaming goat. This is a toy based on the internet meme. Press on the goat’s back and it screams. It’s a silly object, but one that has become central to our household functioning.
How so?
When California went into lockdown, both my husband and I started working from home. He is a recording engineer and tech engineer for a Major Motion Picture Sound Company, and suddenly he and his teammates were tasked with finding ways that they–and the sound and music editors they support–could work from home. He brought home a slew of equipment (my living room looks like the NASA Control Room) and went at it. The task came with a prodigious learning curve that they scaled fearlessly and quickly, but there were moments of frustration. Fortunately, with all the gear, he had also brought home the goat. When he was frustrated, he’d trigger the goat, which would scream. A useful outlet.
So useful that I decided I needed one too. Now, when I’m working from home and the urge to scream hits, I can hit my toy goat and it screams, and in a moment, from the other room, will come an answering scream. And vice versa.
It is a curiously satisfying way, both of discharging irritation and expressing solidarity. So much so that, when a friend became ill, I sent her a pair of screaming goats for herself and her husband. And when I came down to visit my 94-year-old aunt for the first time in 10 months (having been tested, scrubbed, and proved to be as safe as I could be, COVID-wise) I brought her a goat.
It is her new best friend. It makes her laugh, but more, in those inevitable moments when the indignities that come along with considerable age hit, the goat is a helpful outlet.
Since the goat seems to have a calming effect on my family, I wondered where the expression “got my goat” came from. If you get someone’s goat, you upset them. The true origins of the phrase are not confirmed, but one suggestion: apparently, high-strung race horses are often given a goat to keep them company when they’re at racecourses. So if someone takes the goat and your racehorse becomes distraught and therefore loses the race, you become upset. Because someone got your goat.
I don’t know if it’s true, but I kind of like it anyway. The goat, miraculous soother of racehorses and humans. Who knew?
A couple of weeks ago, Gillian Polack wrote about what makes a book great comfort reading, one you want to read over and over, especially when things are difficult.
Then Madeleine Robins wrote about “fluffy bunnies” – books, television, and movies that provide balm to your soul. A story doesn’t have to be “nice” to be fluffy this way.
I’ve got some favorite comfort reads as well, and I’ll get to them in a minute. But first I want to talk about something else I just did to improve my comfort levels: I signed up for an 18-day virtual meditation retreat.
It started on Election Day. At 6 am. In fact, I have to get up for a 6 am one-hour session every day until November 20.
Even though I spent 22 years of my life going to Aikido at 7 am, I never became a morning person. I hate alarm clocks. I hate getting out of bed. By the time morning rolls around, I’m usually very comfortable and see no point in jumping up to meet the world.
That I signed up for this retreat shows you just how desperate I am to get back on center. The pandemic and the election have done a number on me.
It’s not that I don’t know how to meditate already. In fact, the retreat is led by Qigong Master Li Junfeng, with whom I studied when I lived in Austin. I could easily meditate on my own.
Except I haven’t been. Part of the purpose of signing up was to get into a habit. The other part was to get some inspiration from Master Li. He’s a joyful man and joy is good.
Starting today (November 5, 2020), the website Social Justice at the Edge of Chaos is presenting a blog symposium. The symposium is curated by Beth Plutchak, a writer and visionary thinker with a background in economics and social justice.
As the introductory post explains, this symposium is part of an effort to bring the science of complex adaptive systems to bear on the difficult problems facing us today.
Treehouse resident Nancy Jane Moore will be participating in the symposium. Other participants include Debbie Notkin and Dr. Clare Hintz.
New essays will go up each day, followed by responses. The symposium continues through November.
Once the mandatory evacuation order was changed to a warning (aka “it’s okay to go back, just be ready to skedaddle at a moment’s notice”) we went back to our place several times to check things out and make plans on priorities before moving back. Although we were immensely relieved to have a house to come back to, we noticed the light coating of ash on the foliage and the smoky odor inside. Our insurance adjuster came out to the house a couple of days later and we did a walk-through. He pointed out a little ash here and there on the inside window sills, and among other things offered the cost of a professional smoke damage restoration company as part of the settlement. After speaking with several local companies, and returning to take a more careful look inside and out, we decided to clean it ourselves, with the help of local house cleaners, and use the difference to buy a HEPA filter vacuum cleaner, a shop vac, and several air purifiers.
The refrigerator and chest freezer had been without power for three weeks by this time. We hauled the refrigerator on to the back porch and, armed with rubber gloves and doubled trash bags, emptied it. This was a bigger operation than it sounds because we had to take the refrigerator freezer door off in order to fit it through the sliding glass door. The smell, while qualifying as “stench” was not as bad as we’d feared. More “funky” than “rotting carcass.” Most of what was in the fridge was either in glass or plastic containers or vegetables. Our friend up the block, a strict vegan, said hers didn’t smell that bad, more fermented than putrid. Within a short time, the freezer interior was covered with black flies. We left them to their work, freezer door open, and went back to our hotel. When we came back the next day, the smell had largely dissipated and the flies were gone.
The next step was to sanitize and deodorize the refrigerator. Up and down the block, folks were just trashing theirs, but we wanted to at least attempt to salvage ours. My husband did a first pass on the interior with pressure spraying full strength degreaser/cleanser, rinsing with (non potable) water, then wiping it down with dilute bleach. With the doors open, there was no smell, but when we closed the doors and left it for a time, the funky smell returned, albeit not as intense as before.
On social media, neighbors were comparing experiences cleaning their refrigerators. I felt heartened that some had had success. We did some research and found the following resources:
By mutual agreement, I took over the next phase. After studying the UFlorida article, I took a Costco-sized tin of decaf coffee grounds, which no one in the family drinks any longer), spread a thick layer on 3 old cookie sheets, put one on each rack, closed the doors. And turned on the refrigerator. The fridge was now in the house but not plugged in. I’m not sure why we didn’t think of that, but it turns out that circulating the air within the fridge is important to deodorizing.
I let the coffee grounds do their work for three days. By the second day, though, we could smell a distinct coffee tang but no other odors. The final steps involved re-enlisting my husband to clean the condenser, where icky stuff had dripped and then dried, and then do a two-day stint with baking soda to remove the coffee grounds.
The result: a clean-smelling, extremely clean refrigerator with quite a few years of life left in it.
The chest freezer was another matter. Because the interior had seams, it wasn’t possible to sanitize or clean it thoroughly. We called our trash collection service for a bulky item pick-up, then bought a new one. We got a frost-free upright this time.
Besides all this cleaning, we all went through a bit of unexpected grief about the loss of the contents of the appliances, particularly the blackberries my daughter and I had picked all summer, and the squash and green beans that were at the beginning of their harvest. We consoled ourselves that the blackberries would indeed return next summer, and this time we would be able to see them in the freezer better. Our squash plants had flourished in our absence and burst forth with a second harvest (actually on their third now) so I’ve frozen a dozen or so pints of summer squash and the same of green beans.
During this time, we had a small, office-sized refrigerator with a tiny freezer that we bought (with the money saved by cleaning the house ourselves), which has now gone to live in the garage beside the upright freezer. It was a great thing to have because it allowed us to take our time with the refrigerator clean-up, and we will now have a bit of extra cold space (for pears next year and overflow produce).
Through all this, we’ve developed a new appreciation for the convenience of being able to keep foods cold (and to grab an ice pack for a bruise). It’s a luxury that so many of us take for granted. Through most of human history and today in many areas of the world such a thing is unknown. Oddly enough, having my familiar refrigerator back makes this place seem much more like home. I wonder why that it is so.
I wrote out many thoughts on last weekend’s World Fantasy Convention, but something rather important has come up and I need to talk about it. It’s related to World Fantasy, true, but it’s also related to many other online conventions this year.
People from all over the world dropping in to take tea and chat can be delightful… but can also cause problems. No convention has been entirely without problems and no convention has been entirely without moments when cultures have come together and produced fascinating and useful conversations.
I could cause more problems if I listed the issues each and every convention has had or say nice things about the terrific conversations, but I shan’t do either. Instead, I shall give a small list of quite specific ideas to consider. These are the kinds of discussions that program people have or should have. (I’ve had them when programming. And yes, I made mistakes. The world is a big place and full of exceptional complexities.)
1. How do countries see their own various cultures? We can’t just take our own views and use them as a framework for the description of others. My favourite example of this is that people of Korean ancestry are from the dominant culture in Korea and the opposite in the US: a Korean and a Korean American have completely different experience in terms of prejudice and who society favours.
2. How do minorities see themselves, explain themselves, and why? The example I give on panels is often me, myself and I, for I am not the same Jewish as US Jewish and have some very interesting life experiences to prove it. Ask me about them, and ask me what elements of Australian history pushed me towards my self-description as off-white.
3. In any community, who are the experts on matters of culture? I’ve spent a large chunk of my life working on these things and some con-runners know this and ask me to be on panels or for advice. Others… don’t. The variations on ‘don’t’ can be entertaining but often make me feel like an outsider. I have other things to do than spend more of my life as an outsider (I am one anyway, so I don’t need to accept the gift of more outsider status) and move on to other things. We are all different people. Ask around and find out who knows what. (Ask me what my new PhD topic is, I dare you. It includes the words ‘culture’ and ‘genre fiction’. Ask anyone researching what their research is about.)
4. There are procedures and guidelines for working with so many minority cultures in so many countries. My favourites look a bit like this: https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/writing-protocols-for-indigeno-5b4bfc67dd037.pdf This and a set of writing guidelines have been produced by the owners of the culture in order to make it possible for the rest of us to write without appropriation. While not all cultures have documents of this sort, they often have people who can be asked. It would be very useful if possible panellists know about policies and protocols and politics. It would also be useful if they could explain how one works with people of this culture or that. However, none of us know everything. Panellists should all know their limitations. That’s the bottom line. We need to know who we can speak for and who we should defer to on a given subject.
This is not a list of ten. It could be, but those four subjects are immense and enough to be getting on with.
If there’s one firm rule we have in this house, it’s that the dogs are not allowed on the sofa unless specifically invited. How, then, to explain this:
And this:
Also, no squirrels are allowed on the porch!
In case you wonder, I’m an emotional tightwire (like many of you), waiting to find out what’s going to happen on U.S. election day—or, more likely, several weeks after election day. Will we step back from the precipice we’re dancing on? Will we put responsible adults in charge in Washington? Before we all die of Covid or drown in the melting ice caps? Will we save our democracy from our worst impulses?
I can’t stand the wait, and that’s why we’re getting dog pictures on the day before the election.
Close readers may have noted that I missed last month’s slot. Close readers may also remember that the month before that, I had just taken in a foster puppy.
Yes, those two things are related. And I am here to tell you that writing a book, maintaining a Patreon, holding down a part-time office gig, dealing with a pandemic, fighting for democracy AND housebreaking a puppy is exhausting.
But – as everyone expected – I foster-failed, and now the household of two has officially and legally become a household of three. The puppy is four months old and (mostly) housebroken, and Castiel the Cat has learned that if he hisses and swats at her nose, she will stop trying to Make Him Love Her. So all is well, and I can get back to writing and righting all the wrongs, right?
We’re less than a week from the US National Election, which should be the end of a long haul but–knowing the tenor of the current times–will not be. I will not rehash the details, because we’re soaking in them and I don’t need to raise my anxiety level* any higher than it already is.
In these unprecedented, times, as they say on TV, outside of the odd volunteer activity, there’s not much to do to soothe my soul. I find myself reverting to Fluffy Bunnies. Continue reading “Fluffy Bunnies”…
Travel back with me to those long-ago pre-Pandemic days when we went out of the house to do… well, everything. My husband, who has an antic sense of humor, got a screaming goat. This is a toy based on the 
We’re less than a week from the US National Election, which should be the end of a long haul but–knowing the tenor of the current times–will not be. I will not rehash the details, because we’re soaking in them and I don’t need to raise my anxiety level* any higher than it already is.