Author Archives: lydias

This week I’ve celebrated or will be celebrating Pride Week, Canada Day, and the Fourth of July. Other than Halloween, the end of June and beginning of July is my favourite time of year because it’s so festive.

It’s really cool to walk down the street and see so many other LGBT people and straight allies enjoying everything that Pride Week has to offer. Sometimes it gets a little corporate and commercialized, but as someone who grew up in a community where it was most definitely not ok to be open about your life if you existed anywhere outside of the heterosexual, cisgendered bubble it still amazes me sometimes to see how things have changed and continue to change.

As a dual citizen, I love celebrating the birthdays of both of my countries. There’s no such thing as too many fireworks. 😀

If you observe any or all of these holidays, enjoy them!

I’ll be back on Thursday with a regular post.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poems, artworks, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Old Farm Equipment and Scrap  Metal Turned Into Stunning Sculptures via FairfieldJen. I love the creativity of these sculptures.

My Life Is Perfect Hell via LorcaDamon. Ack! Everything I want to say about this link would give away spoilers for it. Go read it, and if you like it as much as I did we can discuss it in the comment section. 🙂

Valentine for Sally Hemings. This is the kind of poem that burrows into your skin.

But the Daisies via Jessicajots. So is this one (for entirely different reasons).

From Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think:

Your Authentic Voice, somewhere in there, knows all about you. In contrast to the black-and-white simplicity of the Social Survival Mammoth, your Authentic Voice is complex, sometimes hazy, constantly evolving, and unafraid. Your AV has its own, nuanced moral code, formed by experience, reflection, and its own personal take on compassion and integrity. It knows how you feel deep down about things like money and family and marriage, and it knows which kinds of people, topics of interest, and types of activities you truly enjoy, and which you don’t. Your AV knows that it doesn’tknow how your life will or should play out, but it tends to have a strong hunch about the right step to take next.

From Scenes From a Life in Negroland:

Are We Rich?

Mother raises those plucked, deep-toned eyebrows that did such excellent expressive work for women in the 1950s. Lift the penciled arch by three to four millimeters for bemused doubt, blatant disdain, or disapproval just playful enough to lure the speaker into more error. Mother’s lips form a small, cool smile that mirrors her eyebrow arch. She places a small, emphatic space between each word: Are. We. Rich? Then she adds, with a hint of weariness: Why do you ask?

The Purity Myth made me shake my head so vigorously I thought it might fall off. 😛

On a serious note, this is a well-rounded critique of all of the myths about what it means to be a “good” girl. The author discusses virginity, modesty, slut shaming, and what happens when girls and women break the unwritten rules about what we are (and aren’t) supposed to be doing.

I heartily recommend it to anyone in the mood to think critically about the way western society treats women.

What have you been reading?

A few weeks ago I blogged about my realization that I’m not that good at keeping in touch with friends and family members who live far away and aren’t active online.

I decided to try being more conscientious about occasionally reaching out to them this summer.  I’m not a fan of talking on the phone, so I decided to use other methods of communication instead: cards, postcards, and email.

It’s been so long since I regularly sent out snail mail that doing so felt about as ordinary as taking your cat on a walk. Sure, you can do it (and the cat might even love it!), but it’s one of those things that’s never been part of my routine.

The response has been warm though. Getting mail that isn’t a bill or useless advertisement is nice, and I suspect that it’s even better for people who grew up before the Internet changed so many of the ways in which we communicate with one another. When I’m old I hope my nephew and niece understand my love for texting and emails even if they’ve moved on to something else.

I’m much better at responding to emails, but even there I sometimes get a few weeks behind. (Although I do reply to everything eventually!) It’s not that I don’t love hearing from people, it’s just one of those tasks that’s very easy to put off until tomorrow.

My goal for the next month is to respond to every email in a week or less. Eventually I’d like to cut that down to a day or two at most, but I thought I’d tackle my response times in stages.

What about you? How have you been keeping up with your loved ones so far this summer?

Photo by Miniaturelop.

Over the weekend this blog received a large influx of new visitors. Many of you followed links from Facebook, but I still haven’t been able to figure out what exactly lead everyone here.

Welcome!

My name is Lydia Schoch. I’m a science fiction author who was born in Ohio but now lives in Toronto with my spouse.

On the Other Hand is an eclectic mix of topics. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about writing, ethics, and my deconversion from Christianity here, but I also have been known to go off on tangents when the right mood strikes.

Sometimes I answer reader questions. You can submit new ones here.

Definitely check out the Link Love on the righthand side of this page while you’re visiting. I follow a wide variety of bloggers – from Mennonites to Atheists – and I highly recommend every single one on that list.

Oh, and I love rabbits. If my better half and I weren’t so allergic to them, we’d no doubt have a few hopping around our apartment. Since this isn’t possible, I occasionally surprise my readers with them here instead. 😉

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, quotes, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Guard against cynicism. The truth of the matter is, for all of the problems we face, if you had to choose any moment to be born in human history, not knowing who you were going to be, you’d choose this time. The world is more tolerant than it’s ever been, more educated than its ever been. The only thing that stops that is people thinking they can’t make any change. – President Obama

Fairy Tales Are Women’s Tales. I was obsessed with fairy tales for several years during my childhood. The  darker ones disturbed me sometimes, but they somehow seemed more true than the later versions of the same tales that were heavily sanitized.

I Watched Three Killer Whales Eat Some Sea Lions via JuliaRBarrett. The pictures are what make this such a fascinating post. No, they aren’t graphic.

Your Questions, Please via brucegerencser. Once a year my friend Bruce answer any questions his readers send to him. If you have any interest in Atheism, deconverting from Christianity, politics, living with a disability, or photography, I highly recommend checking out what he’ll be posting in the near future. (This isn’t an exhaustive list of the types of stuff he talks about, but they are a good cross-section of his interests).

Reasons Why I May Change My Opinion. This is great.

Over the River and Through the Woods. So is this. But everything I want to say about it will give you major spoilers, and it’s so much better if you start reading without any hints about the ending!

“Mom, I’m Bored.” Now What? via CarlgrodyliswS. My parents used to agree with us when my brothers or I told them that life was boring or unfair. We’d then talk about possible ways to make it less boring or unfair, but I always appreciated their willingness to be so honest with us.

From Masters of Love:

Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were.

Missing Microbes made me think of all of the deliciously morbid* stories I read and heard growing up about distant relatives who died or were seriously injured by things that we rarely fear these days: severe food poisoning, farm accidents, birth defects, childbirth, prematurity.

The world we lived in before antibiotics were invented was heartbreaking and dangerous. A scraped knee or sore throat could heal up without a problem. They could also kill you. What makes this book even better, though, is that most bacteria are harmless or beneficial to humans. We wouldn’t survive without them.

So what happens when overusing antibiotics begins to snuff out the strains that might be doing us the most good? Mr. Blaser has some very interesting theories about this. I don’t know enough about the topic to say if I agree or disagree with him, but I’d love to sit down and pick his brain one day.

*Yes, I was an odd kid. I found this stuff utterly fascinating, not scary. 😉

What have you been reading?

One of my favourite things to do while brainstorming  is to scroll through the search terms that lead new readers to this blog. Someone recently ended up here by typing Can social skills be ruined? in a search engine, and I thought it would make a good topic for today’s post.

Social skills are like muscles.

If you exercise them regularly, they’ll make daily life a little easier.

Some people are born with conditions or into circumstances that make it more difficult for them to do certain things. This isn’t an excuse for bad behaviour when it comes to social skills, but it is an explanation for why certain things happen. (Perhaps one of these days I should blog about the difference between excuses and explanations?  🙂 )

It’s much easier to criticize how someone else is doing them than to improve your own weak spots. Every year I become less willing to tell other people what to do unless they seek out my advice. Figuring out the best choices for myself is challenging enough.

A muscle can atrophy if it’s injured severely enough, you’re bedridden,  or if you have a degenerative disease.

I’d argue that the same can be said for social skills. Most people are capable of improving, but there are rare cases when this isn’t possible. Listing them would require much more space than I have for this post.

If you’re self-aware enough to ask this question, though, there’s always hope.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The Secret Life of the Depressed Exposed via Monica_Wilcox. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” I’ve been having a lot of trouble figuring out the right person to attribute this quote to, but it came to mind while reading this confession.

What Feminism Means, According to Kids. This is great. It’s funny to see just how long it takes kids to figure out adult society.

Is Self-Improvement Just Another Word for Self-Loathing?  I don’t think so, but this blogger does make a good point about the dangers of spending too much time thinking about our flaws.

Stop Being Strong via ohheynina. I love this.

From The Truth About the Amish:

But right now, that’s what the future held for this big gelding: a trip to Canada, or one to Mexico– with no possible chance of reprieve. No one could save him, because the seller decided to get a guaranteed price (perhaps less) by selling directly to the kill buyer than taking their chances in the auction ring.  Who does that to their horses? Who steals from them their very, very last chance?

The Amish, that’s who.

From I. Don’t. Think. He’s. There via lovejoyfeminism:

Quite frankly, I didn’t leave Christianity—it left me. I just couldn’t believe anymore. It stopped making sense. And as it stopped making sense, my personal relationship with Jesus became more distant. I tried to hold on, but it was like trying to grab hold of a ghost. Tired of fighting, I let go, and avoided thinking about any of it for a few weeks.

The Remedy is one of the saddest and yet most fascinating medical history books I’ve read this year. Tuberculosis was once endemic in Europe. It was almost impossible to live there without being exposed to it at some point because the bacteria that causes it was everywhere.

If not for how often it killed people, I’d compare it to something like a cold sore or the common cold. It was simply part of everyday life for a surprisingly large portion of the population. What piqued my interest in this book even more, though, was that most people never developed any symptoms after being exposed to it. As soon as the bacteria settled int other lungs, their immune systems basically encapsulated the invaders to prevent them from doing any damage.

You could live the rest of your life with a tiny graveyard of tuberculosis germs in your lungs, and you’d never know that they were even there. I’d always assumed that this disease eventually killed almost everyone who had it, so it was fascinating to see how most people’s bodies were able to fight it off.

This is an excellent choice for anyone who loves reading about medicine or history. It’s also fascinating to see how scientists came up with a cure for this disease given that the cure is beginning to fail with certain, virulent strains of it these days. Scary stuff!

What have you been reading?

Drew and I started dating. We don’t pose for many pictures together, but this is one of the earliest ones of us I could find. It was taken a year or so after we got married.

We met on a now-defunct Christian message board called The Ooze in late 2003 or early 2004. I don’t remember the specific day or month anymore, only that his posts made me laugh almost as much as they made me think.

He smelled nice. The pauses in our conversations were never awkward, even though I can be pretty quiet when I meet someone for the first time.  We wanted the same things out of life – no kids, no pets, and a quiet, simple life in the best city I’ve ever known.

A year later we got married. I’ll save the story of how that happened for our proper 10 year anniversary. As far as I know, all of the time you spent dating somehow stops counting once you’re married 😛

I read a lot of books about marriage and relationships when I was younger. Why? I read everything, and sometimes books are more interesting if you don’t agree with them. It’s boring to stick to one genre or school of thought.

To each their own, but it never made sense to me to distill something as complex as a relationship into bullet points and a one size fits all mentality, though. It still doesn’t.

People aren’t machines. You can’t get what you want from them by pushing the right buttons. What works for me might be a dismal failure for someone else.

So far, so good.  🙂