Lydia Schoch

Photo by Adria Richards.

For anyone who hasn’t heard the news yet, Maya Angelou died yesterday.

No, I’m not sad today. It’s a little odd to grieve over someone you don’t know, but hearing about her death did make me think of my first encounter with her writing. It’s funny how reading someone’s books can make it feel like you know them in certain ways.

I was pretty young when I first read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Some of the things she talks about in that book flew over my head the first time I read it, but each time I returned to it I understood a little more.

The rest of her autobiographies didn’t capture my attention the way the first one did. I suspect that I was too young to grasp everything she had to say.

She was an incredible writer, though. Many stories can be read silently, but hers work better if they’re read aloud. You have to feel every syllable to understand what she’s saying and why she chose certain words.

I’m looking forward to returning to her books as an adult reader. There is a tentative plan bubbling in the back of my mind to blog my way through them, but I’ll have to see what I pick up this time around.

Is anyone interested in following along? Where should I begin?

I’ve really gotten into a musical rut. Most of the artists I listen to are from the 90s and 00s, and I tend to go back to them over and over again.

I’m purposefully not mentioning which artists or styles of music I like so I don’t sway your recommendations.  Some people only like one genre of music, but I’m not one of them.

What have you been listening to?

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

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Children and Adults via lilylayer4. Great stuff.

I Just Ate Fruit for the First Time and It Kind of Sucked. This is one of the funniest things I’ve read so far in 2014.

When Plastic People Say We’re Dead via brudburg. Isn’t this a fantastic title? As soon as I read it, I couldn’t wait to find out what it could possibly be about. I won’t spoil it for my readers  – go check it out for yourselves!

There’s No Such Thing As a Dumb Question. Or is there? This reminded me a little of all of the questions my brothers and I used to ask our parents on long road trips. Sometimes they would pay us to sit quietly and count every animal we saw alongside the road. At $0.01 per animal it was a pretty cheap way for them not to answer a million questions. 😛

From The Amish Closet – Growing Up Gay in a Closed Community via SensaNostra:

“Dad I’m gay.”

His reply?

“You had better join the church and get a wife.”

“D-a-a-a-d!”

From At the Market, Very Late:

Last night in a supermarket about 3 AM, I saw a woman have a serious breakdown. She was buying some items — not a lot, maybe $35.00 worth of cheese, meat and cereal. A basic shopping list. The checkout clerk rang her up, she swiped her credit card —

— and it was declined. No good. Not accepted.

The End of Eve is the true story of the final illness of a woman who exhibited many of the classic signs of narcissism. Her daughter Ariel documents Eve’s final months and recalls painful memories from both of their childhoods.

It’s easy to grieve for someone who was good and kind. Figuring out how to make peace with someone you have mixed feelings about is much harder. The author does a wonderful job describing how and why love is sometimes mixed with anger or resentment.

This wasn’t an easy book to read. Eve made a lot of terrible choices in her lifetime and isn’t someone I would have ever wanted to meet in person. Yet Ariel’s ability to reach out to someone who has burned so many bridges is admirable. It isn’t necessary the choice I would make if I were in her shoes, but I understand why she did it.

What have you been reading?

It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own views, so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold.

–  Peter Singer

I’ve often wondered which social attitudes that are seen as perfectly ordinary in 2014 will make people wince a hundred years from now.

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

What Michael Did. This is the true story of a severely mentally ill man who killed a family member and how the rest of his family coped with it in the years to come.

Cats. Sometimes people act a little like cats. I think I’m one of them. :O

At Least He Didn’t Hurt You via SwiftInkEditor. This is quite the story.

Someone Is Going to Say “I Have to Go to the Moon” in a Bored, Defeated Tone One Day. It’s really only a matter of time. It seems to be human nature to quickly acclimate to things that were extremely rare or impossible a generation or two ago.

On Creed Fatigue, Souls for Sale, and Defying Gravitas via danariely.  My favourite answer was the one about buying and selling souls. Too funny!

From The Private Lives of Public Bathrooms:

Even for the rest of us, who don’t suffer a clinical level of anxiety, the public bathroom is a place that has ingrained behaviors and social rituals—leaving space at the urinals, avoiding conversation even with people you know—that we’ve all experienced, if not daily at an office, than out in the world, at restaurants and ball parks and airports.

Not all protagonists are good, likeable, or safe people. What I enjoyed the most about Alphabet was how little care was taken to soften Simon’s horrendous past. There are good reasons why he turned out to be such a violent, callous adult, but in no way does the author use them to excuse his crimes.

The book starts out with him finally learning how to read and write in prison. What he does with this newfound knowledge kept me on my toes until the final scene.

What have you been reading?

Photo by Jens Buurgaard Nielsen.

While I was working on this blog post, I attempted to look up a story I remember hearing as a small child about a city mouse and a country mouse who take turns visiting one another. The country mouse is as unnerved by the fast pace of city life as his urban cousin is by what it’s really like to live in a old farmhouse surrounded by fields and hungry cats.

It was surprising when I realized that the traditional version of this tale is quite different from how I remember it. I thought it taught its audience to appreciate the differences between people and realize that what you or I see as an acceptable risk or drawback might cross the line for someone else. It turns out that this fable actually teaches that accepting a simple, modest existence is better than living in fear.

Too funny!

It makes me wonder what was really in the little book that made such a strong impression on me. None of my searches have turned up anything similar to it. This is one of those mysteries of early childhood that will probably never be solved.

I was originally planning to use today’s post to talk about finding the value in other ways of looking at the world. To be honest, though, I’m far more interested in how much memories can change over time.

What have you misremembered lately? How did you discover that your memory of what happened (probably) isn’t actually true?

The Gift from BLR_VFX on Vimeo.

This is why I love science fiction. I can’t say anything else without giving away spoilers!