Lydia Schoch

Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper.

– Richard Siken

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.”

― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man and Prison Writings

I was planning to write a long post on this subject, but Oscar Wilde sums it up much better than I can.

There was a time when I cringed when the word selfish was tossed around. Now I look up to see who is throwing it and what their intentions might be.

Yes, sometimes it’s used for legitimate reasons. Only thinking about yourself isn’t an appealing or helpful trait.

But at other times people use this word to push others into choices that they’d never make on their own. It’s even worse than being selfish to me because it presumes that other adults can’t possibly make good choices on their own. Their profound lack of trust and uncontrollable urge to micromanage other adults is deeply troubling.

Here is this week’s list of paintings, short stories, photographs, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Befuddled via CocoJGingerSays. I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I really like it.

Goblin Market. I heard this poem for the first time last week when it was quoted in a Dr. Who episode my husband was watching. It’s quite the tale if there’s anyone else out there who somehow skated through their childhoods without hearing it.

The Irish Atheist Strikes a Deal.  This is such a fantastic idea. Hopefully there will be churches who take him up on it!

The Humble(d) Husband: the Two Coders via HacksIsTeenEyed. Certain words have completely different meanings depending on your profession. This blog post explores what it’s like to be married to someone whose understanding of one such word is so completely different from the author’s own.

Russian Mother Takes Magical Pictures of Her Two Kids With Animals On Her Farm via PenguinGalaxy. The best photographs are of the ones with the boy and his bunny. So cute.

From Do We Have to be Offended by Everything:

Whatever the case is, there is no possible chance that you could be wrong.

And yet.

What if you are wrong?

And what if your defensiveness has effectively shut down an opportunity to learn something?

And what if you genuinely did hurt someone?

Anxiety: A Short History is the most interesting book I’ve read so far in 2014.

There have always been people who felt anxious, but how societies thought of it has varied quite a bit from one century to the next. This book discusses how and why these sentiments have changed over the years. While it’s more academic than the typical book I recommend here, I still highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

What have you been reading?

Just tuning in? Start here. 

Daphne glanced down at the sleeping baby in her lap. The mite had recently decided that only Daphne or her mother were allowed to hold her, and Mariposa could hardly be expected to bounce a potentially fussy baby while hearing her cases. She was too small to be separated from her mother from the hours this meeting might take, but with a fully belly and fresh diaper the baby would almost certainly sleep through at least the first half of the meeting.

Daphne took a few slow, deep breaths in an attempt to calm herself down before the council convened. There was no reason to be nervous today.  It wasn’t like she was on trial. Unless something unexpected happened she wouldn’t have to speak at all.

Still, she’d had nearly 20 years of experience doing her best to avoid such a setting. Her first brush with the law had been such an unmitigated disaster that even her brief stint as an ombudsman a few years back had done little to calm her fears. Council members carried a lot of social sway in the community, and she’d seen what happens when that influence was used for ill.

Lemon whined and stuck his nose out from underneath her skirt. She surreptitiously reached down to pat his soft head while Mariposa took her place as the far end of the council.  Technically he wasn’t supposed to be here at all, but Daphne thought she could get away with it if she sat at the back of the room and kept her oldest friend quiet. It was comforting to have him close by when she was surrounded by so many people she didn’t know.

Despite living in Peoria for four years she hadn’t been very good at getting to know everyone. It was overwhelming enough to live in a small, crowded house with seven other people. Had her knees not been so bad she would have gone back to her own house in Mingus at least occasionally to get away from the ruckus. She loved them, of course, but Daphne craved solitude so deeply that not having it was like carrying around a bucket of rocks on her hip.

The inane breakfast conversations three seconds after she dragged herself to the table, the cat yowls when someone forgot to prop the front door open, and the quiet sounds of her son and daughter-in-law making the grandchild she was starting to believe might actually stick around ground into her mind as she attempted to fall asleep each night. Sometimes she dreamed about the day’s events, wiping sticky mouths

The crowd stirred as the head ombudsmen called the hearing to order. As expected, most of the plaintiffs complained about water rights. There was just enough to go around if everyone shared their excess, but not everyone could be counted on to do it. As the evidence was presented Daphne felt her mind wander to a time she wished she could forget.

“It’s shameful,” a tall man complained as he paced back and forth in front of the council. Daphne’s stomach lurched, the invader inside of it skimming against her muscles like a hummingbird gliding through the morning air. “She can barely take care of herself, and you think she should be allowed to raise one by herself in the middle of nowhere?”

A low murmur rippled through the crowd. It wasn’t the first time someone had brought this up.

A much younger Aunt Lucy leaned over the desk and peered at Daphne. There was a streak of dark brown hair stubbornly running through her grey mane. She had shrunk a little with age, but people were beginning to wonder how she remained so active at an age when most of her contemporaries were retiring to a quiet back room to weave and mind small children while their parents worked. The other ombudsmen avoided eye contact as their leader stared silently at the woman with such an unorthodox plan. Daphne’s mouth ran dry. She opened it and then closed it again without saying anything.

“How old are you, again?”

“38.” Some women were grandmothers at that age, occasionally several times over again. 

“How do you plan to support this child?”

“I have a garden…”

The baby wrapped her fingers around Daphne’s pointer finger and squeezed. Somehow her left arm had wriggled out of the blanket Daphne had wrapped her in so securely before the hearing began. So much for that nap, but at least she wasn’t crying yet. A muffled snore rose up from the floor. Now how on earth had Daphne rocked a baby awake while the dog fell asleep on the cold, stone floor?

The hours dragged on as case after case was heard. Every time her mind began wandering again either the baby or the dog demanded attention. A certain part of Daphne was grateful for the distraction.

“Mr. Miller doesn’t own enough land to properly look after six damn goats.  He even lets them sleep in his living room of all places!” the plaintiff whined. Daphne rocked the baby as he added as many details to his complaint as he could pack in before he was interrupted again. To make matters worse, this was the third such case they’d heard this morning.

Well, at least she wasn’t responsible for sorting out this mess. Newcomers weren’t invited onto the council until they’d lived in Peoria for 5 years, and even then their names were only added to the list if one of the current ombudsmen retired and their household was next on the list. Mariposa hadn’t been volunteering in this capacity long enough to resent it. Daphne was quite safe for now.

“Let’s break for lunch,” Mariposa said when Mr. Brown finally finished. “We’ll give you our verdict this afternoon.”

The baby grunted. She would need to be fed and changed again soon. Mariposa had called for a break just in time.

Photo by KJohansson.

A few years ago my dad asked me how many books I’ve read in my lifetime. I laughed and told him it was impossible to say for sure.  Words are like oxygen to me.

“Well, can you make a guess?” he asked.

“No.”

A pause in the conversation.

“Would you write down every book you read for the next year?”

“Yes!”

Just like that a family tradition was born. At the end of every year I email the list of books I read to my parents. Once or twice they’ve shared their lists with me as well. Sometimes they’ve recognized stuff they also read that year, but most years I seem to find authors that they aren’t that familiar with.

This year dad had an additional request:

“Blog about what you read!”

He wanted me to add Amazon links to every single book in this post so that I’d make a little money if anyone decides to purchase one of them through my affiliate links. Instead I’ve decided to only provide links to the stories I really loved.  For privacy reasons I am not including the books I read for the site I write reviews for. If you were to add them to this list it would be about twice as long.

Longterm readers may notice similarities between this list and what I recommend every week Suggestion Saturday.

January

Christine Lim “Who Saw the Deep” (science fiction)
Pearl S Buck “The Child Who Never Grew” (biography)

I recently read a blog post from Elena Square Eyes that made my heart flutter.

Last year she kept track of all of the good things that happened to her in 2013 and blogged about it at the end of the year. She has a cute glass jar to hold the slips of paper commemorating all of the good things that happen to her.

I decided to be thrifty, honour my roots, and reuse an old yogurt container. It’s  pretty plain for now. Perhaps I’ll find some construction or wrapping paper somewhere over the next 12 months to give it some sort of decorative flair.

In the meantime, I’ve discovered my first entry for my makeshift jar: Amelia.

She was born a few weeks ago and is my first niece. I can’t think of a better way to begin 2014.

What does your 2014 jar of good things look like?

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

January 26, 1966 via CoyoteSings. This is such a great post.

From Jackalope Wives:

Now, it happened there was a young man in town who had a touch of magic on him. It had come down to him on his mother’s side, as happens now and again, and it was worse than useless.

A little magic is worse than none, for it draws the wrong sort of attention. It gave this young man feverish eyes and made him sullen. His grandmother used to tell him that it was a miracle he hadn’t been drowned as a child, and for her he’d laugh, but not for anyone else.

He was tall and slim and had dark hair and young women found him fascinating.

This sort of thing happens often enough, even with boys as mortal as dirt. There’s always one who learned how to brood early and often, and always girls who think they can heal him.

From Life and Death, Rich and Poor:

While we’re going through this life, I think one of the greatest gifts we can give to the world is simply leaving no pain in our wake as we go through our days. The world we live in can be cold. People can be selfish and pursue their dreams with a cruel disregard for what that pursuit may mean to other people. It seems that, more and more, we live in a world in which people care little for the happiness and well-being of others. There is still tremendous good in the world, and there are times when we get to see that good clearly demonstrated in acts of selflessness which remind us that we are all connected and we’re all in this together.

 Men Are 32x More Likely to Be Killed By Lightning than Falsely Accused of Rape. Charles Clymer always has interesting things to say. This article is especially worth reading.

Death on Roller Skates via Sarcastiker. I’ve never seen the personification of death drawn this way before. Interesting stuff.

What Lies Below the Surface via everettepoetry. My father used to say that still waters run deep. He never did say what was swimming underneath it, though. 😉

Always Look on the Bright Side is the perfect book to only read part of.

It’s a collection of quotes about all sorts of topics – death, love, the seasons, graduations, and holidays to name just a few. What I liked most about it was that the quotes aren’t cloying or sentimental. Longterm readers know that I have little patience for that sort of thing, and it’s nice to have a book full of less flowery material.

You officially have my permission to skim, skip, and cherry pick the contents of this collection. Ha!

What have you been reading?

Photo by Jay Galvin.

Just tuning in? Start here. 

Everyone else could be distracted, bribed, fooled, or, if all else failed, possibly even reasoned with. Not Rosamund.

Each sunrise she had long since learned to expect a clean pail of water, a small breakfast, and an affectionate pat on the head as she ate. During harvest season she  was used to carrying baskets of produce back to the house to be processed. A few trading missions a year might carry her away from home for a few days, a week at most, for the household to trade for the few things it couldn’t produce on its own.

But evening was always her time. Someone – usually one of the children – would brush the animals as Daphne softly told all of them one or two of the stories that had been passed down from the time before. The rhythmic sounds of the woman’s voice falling into soft grooves as the heroes and heroines leapt into action was soothing. Sometimes the burro flicked her ears at the climax of the plot, leading Wilma to believe that Rosamund understood far more of what she was hearing than one might expect. When the stories ended the humans always checked the water supplies one final time before Rosamund settled down for the night with Mariposa’s burro, Dusty, by her side.

So it was with a hoof-deep sense of irritation that Rosamund allowed her favourite human to lead her out of the lean-to while Dusty slurped up the last, precious dregs of well water that had been delivered curiously early today.  As always, Lemon pranced from one member of his pack to the next as Isaac very quietly shut the door. Rosamund had never learned to love the noisy, little beast, but she’d long since realized that he was all bark and no bite.

Lemon yipped as Daphne slowly climbed on top of the beast for the short ride to Salt River. Had her knees not been so sore Daphne could have easily walked to the meeting place, but it would be a much faster trip this way.

“Shh!” She frowned at him, tossing something small into the air. He caught it before it landed and swallowed it in one gulp.

“Lemon, you didn’t even taste that,” Daphne faux-scolded in a whisper. “If you’re quiet I’ll let you have another one.”

Ephraim knew how long it took to gather water, and he’d grow suspicious if his brother tarried for too long. They hadn’t figured out a good excuse for Daphne to wander so far away from home, so her older son would be even more confused if he noticed her missing, too. One could only spend so much time telling stories to the animals before someone came looking for you, after all. While most of Ephraim’s attention was focused on the new baby and keeping the rest of the household running smoothly, there would come a time when he started looking for her.

The ride to the river was quick and quiet. Lemon had calmed down a little as he aged, and while he was still a fairly young dog Daphne did notice that he seemed slightly less interested in chasing the wild rabbits than he had been even a year or two ago. A cursory sniff and practice bark – if only to tempt her into throwing another piece of cheese to him – were about as far as his sense of adventure took him on ordinary nights.

Nevada Reed stood at the edge of the river just as the afternoon began haemorrhaging into evening. Sean, her husband, was running late as usual, and she would much rather wait for him at the meeting place than sit at home with hummingbirds buzzing around her gullet.

Daphne nodded her hello, not bothering to slip off of her ride. It would be a short visit.

“How is it looking?” Isaac asked.

“Almost ready.”

“Any word yet?”

“No. It’s as quiet as ever,” she said as she tilted her head over and scratched her right ear.

“You’ve heard from Avery, then?”

“Not exactly.”

Daphne frowned. He was normally the most punctual member of their group, especially with the rumbles of the past few months. No one had seen the soldiers in years, but Milton had been fielding a slowly increasing number of strangers moving through their community.

Peoria, at least, had weathered the last five years fairly well. They’d bounced back quickly from the peculiar illness that killed so many in Mingus, and unlike surrounding communities the soldiers had never found much to be interested in their homes or fields. Their lack of wealth or any consistent type of trade protected them from the worst of the occupation.

Milton hadn’t been so lucky. It wasn’t as dangerous as Mingus, but from all reports it was still recovering from the shock of the past few years. As someone born and bred in the unlucky town, Avery was the perfect person to speak for it when Daphne and the Reeds began covertly travelling around to see who was interested in organizing some sort of early alarm system if – when – the soldiers returned.

For three years their system had worked seamlessly. Any suspicious visitors or activities were reported to other communities right away. At first it was a valley watch in name only. It had only been in the last year or two that trade had slowly resumed and people began travelling during the cold season once again, but even the false alarms gave Daphne a sense that she was doing something to protect her community.

About a week ago Avery spotted two men walking down a dry creek bed. They had no family in the area and nothing to trade. Their language was peppered with words that no one had ever heard before, and despite the danger of travelling in such a state they carried only one small water flask each. By the time Avery found them all of their water supplies were long gone and their lips were crusted over with thirst. It was as if they’d never been in a desert before.

The story made Daphne’s stomach knot up.

Especially when Avery casually mentioned that the younger man carried around a flat stone in his knapsack that he only examined when he thought no one was around.

This is an amazingly accurate U.S. accent quiz.

It accurately pegged me as someone who spent nearly all of her childhood in the midwest. I’d love to know the results of my U.S. readers, especially those of you who may have lived in more than once subculture. Post your results in the comments.

I have a theory about the correlation between character and how you behave in a sit-down restaurant: how you treat your server is a very good indication of who you really are as a person.

The interesting thing about waitstaff is that they can’t say anything when (general) you do something inappropriate, rude, or worse.

Some people respond well to this kind of environment. They intuitively know how they’d like to be treated if the tables were turned, and they treat everyone with kindness.

Others don’t.

Are there times when it’s appropriate to complain or feel angry? Of course.

But when they become a predictable part of dining out with someone you think you know, beware.

This person is showing you their true colours.