Lydia Schoch

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

Since I Lost My Baby via fsouth. A gripping short story about grief, death, and coming to terms with a new chapter in life. Everything else I want to say about this piece includes spoilers, so my description of it remains vague. Just trust me when I tell you it’s a must-read!

How Having Multiple Boyfriends Is Like Having Multiple Kids. This post is innocuous, but other parts of the site are NSFW.

Tham Lod Cave. Who wants to explore this cave with me?

Evil Tyrants and Their Disappointing Family Members via pinkertonpark. It’s fascinating to see what members of the same family do and do not have  in common. Sharing the same DNA or home environment is no guarantee that you’ll share the same interests, religion, political beliefs, or anything else.

From What We Can & Can’t Trust via OriahMtnDrmr:

Inevitably, the person who has sought me out, says something like- “I don’t think I can ever trust my own judgement again- I didn’t see the lie, didn’t anticipate the betrayal, should have known, could have left, didn’t see who she was, what he was up to. . . .”

From Slavery’s Last Stronghold:

The usually stoic mother — whose jet-black eyes and cardboard hands carry decades of sadness — wept when she saw her child’s lifeless face, eyes open and covered in ants, resting in the orange sands of the Mauritanian desert. The master who raped Moulkheir to produce the child wanted to punish his slave. He told her she would work faster without the child on her back.

This week’s recommendation is The End of the Suburbs.

The most restless years of my childhood were spent in the suburbs. I hated relying on my parents to drive us into town to visit the library or catch a movie. What little there was to do within the geographic boundaries of our subdivision quickly became boring from overuse.

I was ecstatic when we moved to town the winter after I turned 15. At about 15,000 residents it was still achingly small for my tastes, but at least I could take a walk to rent movies, borrow library books, or buy a cookie at one of the old-fashioned bakeries in the original downtown strip. It was the faintest taste of the life in Toronto that awaited me as an adult.

This book explains how and why city life is once again becoming more popular than suburban life. We are reversing a trend that started decades ago, and I am as interested in why people flocked to the suburbs in the 1950s as I am in why they are now coming to their senses. 😛

Yes, I’m totally joking there. It’s just hard for me to see the appeal of suburban life. Rural addresses at least include ample space and a front row seat to the beauty of nature. The suburbs seem to include the worst of both worlds – you’re surrounded by people yet have little to no access to public transit, artistic festivals, or stores within walking distance.

What have you been reading?

Painting by Achraf Amiri.

Like most city people, I’ve perfected the art of not making eye contact with strangers. There have been times I’ve walked right by someone I knew without noticing them because I’m so focused on gliding through the crowd and preserving everyone’s illusion of personal space.

Yet I’ve been talking to a lot of strangers recently.

Most of them need directions. You can tell they’re about to approach you before they make the final decision to do so. The soft hesitation in their body language and furtive glances they toss at passer-byes gives them away.

Somehow they decide I’m the right person to approach.

Maybe I have a friendly face. I don’t know. It’s an easy way to help, though, and I don’t mind pointing them in the right direction if I know how to get to their destination.

But occasionally these interactions provide fodder for blog posts or short stories. The other day I was carrying home a case of soda when a stranger approached me.

“I don’t suppose I could have one of those?” he asked with a smile.

“Sorry, no,” I said. Good Canadians preface everything with an apology, and I’d been so wrapped up in my thoughts that it had taken me a few seconds to register what was happening. It’s a little odd to talk to people you don’t know up here in Toronto.

He shrugged and walked away, but I carried the conversation with me wishing I’d said yes. If nothing else, it would have given me more time to figure out why he was asking. The possibilities are endless.

(If the embedded video doesn’t work, click here).

What I love about this video is how creatively Catherine Bracy works to connect ideas that I would have never thought had anything in common.  It reminds me of Lifehacker, and I’m drawn to the idea that there are no “musts” in this lifetime.

As long as you’re not harming yourself or someone else against their will, you can opt into or out of anything. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all life.

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

Hunting and Belonging via KSal1958. One of my very few complaints about living in a big city is how disconnected urban people are from the land. Hunting is unfashionable here and very few people garden (well, other than possibly growing a few herbs or a tomato plant if you’re lucky enough to have a windowsill/balcony). Our parks are either immaculately groomed or have strict rules about where people are allowed to roam if they’ve been kept “wild.” I totally understand why the culture is the way it is, but this essay makes me miss my more rural upbringing.

Remorse Pixie. This is so true.

10 Stories About Grandmother via Millie_Ho. It’s funny how much you can learn about someone through anecdotes.

Shipwrecked in Whole Foods. I don’t necessarily agree with everything I share on Suggestion Saturday, but I do think this author makes a good point about the weirdness of marketing sustainability, social responsibility, and genuinely healthy food to wealthy households. Everyone needs nutritious food to survive, and human civilization can only survive for a limited amount of time if we use up our resources faster than they can be replaced. Yet somehow these ideas have become trendy and luxurious. Paradoxically, I also feel like this author is being a little harsh on the environmental and health food movements. You can have a very healthy lifestyle on a tight budget with enough preparation and (informal) education.

The False Memory Archive: Did That Really Happen? via Zorabike. Such an interesting article.

From Hospice Is a Busy Place:

On a warm spring day, Maggie checked into hospice in a nearby town. At the age of 65, she had Stage Four ovarian cancer, and having refused chemotherapy and radiation treatments, her doctors recommended that she enter hospice as soon as possible.

From The Empathy Exams:

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response. My Stephanie script is twelve pages long. I think mainly about what it doesn’t say.

Generation Atheist is the most honest book I’ve read so far this year.

Deconversion can be a touchy topic. While some people are genuinely interested in my story, others approach the idea of a devout Christian gradually shedding her faith with horror. Rather than listening to what actually happened they take one’s words out of context and apply their own interpretation to what actually happened.

What I really appreciate about this collection is its diversity. There are contributors who are still reeling from the often unexpected social consequences of their reconversion to individuals who have long since made peace with their new realities. Preacher’s kids sit alongside ex-mormons, ex-muslims, and members of the LGBT community in an extremely interesting and provocative collections of essay.

If the contributors share one thing in common with one another it seems to be this: in most cases people who retained the love and support of their families – whether biological or chosen – have done significantly better emotionally than their peers who were shunned or disowned.

I know some of my readers are religious, and by no means do I want to dissuade them from their beliefs. But I do hope that by recommending this book I’ll give them a taste of what it’s like to stand in someone else’s shoes.

What have you been reading?

I’ve been thinking about this for several weeks now.

After the Storm is a good story, but the time has come to finish developing it in private before it’s officially released.

Sometimes writing is messy. It can take much more (or less) time to finish a story than you originally thought it would.  I’m getting to the point now where I need to go back, reread the earlier sections, and end it the right way. There is also work I need to do on the independent science fiction stories I’m preparing for release in the very near future.

I’ve delayed this decision because of how much I loved your responses to each chapter as it went live, but I still think it’s the right one.

To end this post on a happy note,  here is a raccoon popping bubble wrap. Watching it made me giggle so much yesterday that I just had to share it with my readers.

My morning laugh.

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

From Mint Tea Crushed via FrenzyOfFlies:

Mint leaves,
From the Chinese restaurant.
Crushed, stirred with sugar, tea,
Poured into plastic cups.

A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow. This is one of those articles whose comment section should not be overlooked. The response to the post is just as interesting as what was originally said, especially for those of us who are linguistic nerds.

100 Famous Movie Quotes as Charts via InlawsOutlaws. Some of these I understood right away. Others not so much, but it was still fun to give it a try.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman Did Not have Free Choice and Neither Do You. A long but excellent blog post about addiction, free will, mental health, and why some people can safely dabble with mind-altering substances while others get hooked on them in a very short period of time.

Monday Goblin via flirtybloomers. I love the imagery in this poem.

One glance at Harry Stamps’ obituary makes me wish I had known him in person:

He particularly hated Day Light Saving Time, which he referred to as The Devil’s Time. It is not lost on his family that he died the very day that he would have had to spring his clock forward. This can only be viewed as his final protest.

Wild Fell is the best ghost story I’ve read in a very long time.

What I love about ghost stories is how tightly they cling to the past. Whether the deceased died 5 years ago or 200, who they were when they were alive and what happened to them still matters. The unfurling of their lives is as fascinating to me as it is to walk through a graveyard or comb through other people’s memoirs.

This particular book is made even more amazing by its prose. The descriptions are so detailed that I honestly felt as if I was walking alongside the characters as they meet their fates. This is a fantastic choice for anyone who has never read a ghost story before because the paranormal elements are so well balanced by the ordinary activities of daily life.

What have you been reading?

Just tuning in? Start here. 

“No, she didn’t ask that,” Wilma said with a shrug.

Daphne sighed. There were times when the girl’s unusually concrete frame of mind made speaking with her difficult. Subtle nuances in the meanings of words or gestures that other kids picked up early weren’t easy for Wilma. Last summer she’d dragged two yowling cats to hide out in the barn after hearing Isaac casually referring to the fact that there was more than one way to skin a cat. It took more time than Daphne cared to remember to convince her that it was an idiom and the pets were safe.

But today Daphne was thrilled that Wilma needed extra prodding in unfamiliar conversations. Rey might know they have moved, but she didn’t know where they’d ended up. Yet.

The stone was still sending and receiving messages when she shooed the girl off to finish her chores before dinner. Wilma’s conversation was exactly how she had described it. There were no surprises, save for the fact that the girl’s spelling was even more atrocious than Daphne remembered. She was a little surprised Rey was able to make out some of the words.

What surprised her even more was how much the face of the stone had changed since it was last activated. The little buttons on it were larger and brighter. A few options had disappeared entirely, and of the ones that were left not all of them seemed to work any longer. The writing tablet section was still functional. The supply and personnel lists were not. Most curiously of all, the button that once included a series of stories about what was happening in the capital hadn’t been updated at all since the last time the stone stopped working.

After spending a long day surrounded by other people it was actually kind of nice to sit quietly and play around with this puzzle. It was like a book whose pages never stayed the same, except that books never needed to be left in the sun to give them energy. An old word flitted around in the back of Daphne’s mind.

Newspaper.

They had been a kind of book she read about once, but she didn’t remember their characters moving around as much as this one did.

“Does Lemon still like cheese?” The message startled Daphne. “I’ll bring some for him if he does.”

She stared at the screen for a minute. The three-letter answer would be so easy to type out, but what little Daphne knew about the soldiers made her hesitant to give them any information. Lemon had unintentionally intimidated them before, and as soon as he recognized their scents she had no doubt he’d try to lick them to death again.

“Wilma?” The screen blinked. Had a real person been standing in front of her it would have been terribly rude to ignore them. Words weren’t people, though, and Daphne’s conscience only stung her a little as she wrapped the stone in a clean cloth and took it inside without a word.

***

Waiting was the hardest part of this chapter in her life. Daphne had routinely gone days – if not weeks – without speaking to anyone in years past. She’d enjoyed the long, quiet days of rest during the worst heat and the short, busy ones when it was time to plant or harvest. Back then there had been few things to anticipate. When she felt restless she went on long walks at dawn or dusk. On the rare occasions she was lonely she’d go on a short visiting tour, only stopping to see those who’d been kindest to her.

It still felt odd sometimes to wait for the world to come to her. Had the sheriff visited Henry yet to see how serious his threats were? How quickly would Rey and her soldiers track down their new home? Or would she assume they’d died off like so many others? Was there any recent news about the resistance that Avery had told the Reeds since the last time she’d seen them?

Would the baby ever grow into her name? Daphne knew her opinion didn’t count, but she thought it was silly to give such a long one to someone so small. Better to start out with something simple and change it once the kid was old enough to warrant so many syllables. Of course, what else would she expect from a woman who decided that Rosamund was a good name for a burro?

One of these days she would have to start using it, though. The baby was beginning to recognize it as something that belonged to her and her only.

Isaac went back onto the road soon after Wilma’s conversation with Rey. He was never happy in the same location longer than a few weeks. There were only so many places to visit in the valley, though, so Daphne knew she’d see him again soon. The baby grew. Paige shrank even further into herself. It felt like winter would never end.

And then one day the sheriff came walking up the path to Mariposa’s house. He carried a grim smile on his face and a worn satchel over his left shoulder.