Gina Harris's Blog, page 44

My books and I

I intend for this week to be about some of my tidying efforts.

The order that I am going in is based largely on how much an area annoys me. 

It surprised me to be focusing on my bookcase; I was sure that at this time I was not going to tackle books. I was partly right, but not all the way.

In fact, I have kept many books that I will probably not keep forever. I still am not going into another bookcase in a different part of the house, and there is still a not particularly tidy collection of books on my nightstand.

The primary reason I did not think that I was going to deal with the bookcase was that the top shelf has magazines that I am going to read someday. I knew I was not going to touch them. I did not touch them.

It was the shelves below them that were bugging me, so those are what I tackled.

Again, it is really easy to know what I have no interest in keeping, and easy letting it go. That is the part of the process that was most valuable for me, and that is the one that I have down.

Back when I was seeing more pushback against Marie Kondo, a lot of it was focused on books, and people being angry that she might suggest limiting yourself to thirty books. 

Of course that is missing the point of what sparks joy. Having a lot of books that you have already read and once was enough, or that you will never really read, is not likely to spark joy. 

There are books that are comfort books for me, that I periodically want to revisit. Without having counted it out, I can't swear that there would be more than thirty. 

However, right now I am in the middle of something that suits me really well. These reading projects that I do (and my lists) do help me get more out of my reading. I am not at a point where I want to disrupt that. 

I am getting to books now that I have had for years, and feeling joy about getting to them. (Some of them are not exactly joyful, but they are still giving me information I like to have, which I enjoy.)

I know that this is temporary. It may take five more years, though that is just an estimate. After that, I will probably go through and discard a lot, and that will be fine too.

My way of doing it would not be for everyone. However, going through and looking at what you are doing, and confirming that it is what you want, as opposed to shuffling along in the habits you have had and may not particularly like, makes a huge difference.

It is not just that everything is more purposeful, though that is huge. It is also that I am choosing me, displaying confidence in me, voting for me... it is remarkably affirming.

I know what I am doing, and I like it.

Music Review: Crestillion and Ejectorseat

Today's bands are bands where I have been followed by current or former members of the band, then reviewed other bands they were in. These bands may not even be active now, but I still felt like I should review them. (They did require some more searching.)

Music making is a process rife with change. Just because something is no longer happening doesn't mean that it never happened or never mattered. Becoming disconnected from it, though, is still possible.

Crestillion

Crestillion is a rock duo from Stockholm that was once a quartet. At some point after that change, there were plans for regrouping and doing more, but nothing else has been posted since 2019. 2020 did undo a lot of plans.

More songs appear to have been done with the duo.

The music is very synthy and auto-tuned I would say more dance than rock. It is still fun to listen to, with a profundity to the lyrics that often happens with Scandinavian bands singing in English.

https://www.facebook.com/Crestillion/

https://www.instagram.com/crestillion/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc6yDLVb2a1Hiedv6hqITgg

https://twitter.com/crestillionband 

 

Ejectorseat

Ejectorseat is more of a traditional rock sound, and pretty pounding with their charting single, "Attack! Attack! Attack!".

Their most recent Facebook post is from 2016 about listening to The Further, which two of their members were in, so it appears that whatever happened to the band, good feelings were maintained.

As there is also an Ejector Seats band and label, it is easy to find the wrong music. You can find three tracks on Spotify, but it does not have "Not My Girl", which I could only find on Youtube (and under the Ejector Seats topic). 

That doesn't mean that they are not worth checking out, and they will get a song of the day. It is just something to keep in mind when you are listening.

https://www.facebook.com/EjectorSeat/ 

 

Speaking of assessing...

Back in April there was a Twitter question about how you would assess yourself, Dungeons & Dragons style.

When creating a D&D character, you roll a regular (6-sided) die three times for each of six traits. Scores between 1 and 18 (depending on the edition) reveal your aptitude for different things, like casting spells or winning a fight or being undetected.

Back in grade school, my friend Jennie, her sister Sara and I would play in our own way, making up things without the use of a dungeon master, maps, and the other dice, however, we did roll our characters, and I ended up with a character who was strong and not that bright.

I think I was initially irritated with that, but then just leaned in and went full barbarian as Carna, a chaotic good warrior who (and this goes with the chaotic, if not the good) would go full on Beserker whenever we encountered bat dwarfs. (We might have made those up.) The downside of this was that the insides of bat dwarfs emitted a horrible stench, so the aftermath of killing them was very unpleasant, but she just couldn't help herself.

(Was my D&D character MAGA?)

Anyway, this was the guide I used for scoring. It is from a different edition, because it goes to 20, but it was converted from an edition that went to 25:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/81cras/dd_ability_score_ranges_described/

That led me to these scores:

Strength 9: Has trouble lifting heavy objects for a longer time
(Are we talking about lifting over head? I might be selling myself short here.)

Dexterity 8: Somewhat slow, occasionally trips over own feet
(Sometimes. Not often.)

Constitution 10: Occasionally contracts mild sicknesses
(I might be selling myself short here too, but the next one up is about taking multiple hits before losing consciousness, and I can't promise that.)

Intelligence 19: Highly knowledgeable, probably the smartest person many people know
(The only reason I didn't choose 20 is because it hasn't made me famous. I am confident in this!)

Wisdom 20: Nearly prescient, able to reason far beyond logic
(Obviously.)

Charisma 16: Quickly likeable, respected or feared by many people. May be very eloquent. Good at getting their will when talking to people
(I was surprised to have a high score here, but as they described it...) 

I'm a little unbalanced.

I wasn't always like this. I mean, my mental abilities have always been higher than my physical abilities, but I used to be stronger and tougher. (My dexterity was never great.)

Part of that was just less chance to keep up. When I first started caring for my mother, we would go on walks in the park. While she could not go as far as I could, it still wasn't bad. As she slowed down, I wanted to do more. I tried leaving her on a bench once while I did another loop. She said she would stay there, but she did not. The only reason I was willing to try was because I could see her from almost the entire path, but running across the park as I saw her wandering off was too stressful to be a good workout.

If you don't use it, you'll lose it. That is true.

I suppose that is why exploring Washington Park and the different trails was so important, as well as committing to a large baking last Friday. Yes, I am weaker, but I can still do things. It takes longer, but maybe I can build back some. 

I used to have a lot more stamina. I am not sure that I can get all of it back, but I at least want to find out what is possible.

Assessing

I promise that upcoming posts will have multiple references to A Burst of Light, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Health At Every Size, and Happy Fat. 

For now, though, after two days of on-boarding at work, with going through various exercises, I want to write about some of that. (Except for my new insights on preferring vampires to zombies; I think I will save that for October.)

There were two things that stood out.

One is that we took a brief DISC assessment. That rates you on factors of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness.

I scored a 92% on Steadiness, 64% each on Influence and Conscientiousness, and 14% on Dominance.

A few years ago I am sure I would have scored higher for Dominance. I do care about results, I have become so averse to abuses of power now that even descriptions of some things that would probably work out as benign sound repugnant to me. 

As it is, I do take charge of situations pretty easily if people just need direction. If people need more of a "taskmaster" because they want to goof off, I would really rather not deal with that nonsense. Sometimes you have to, though, and I do what I have to do. (Is that the Conscientiousness?)

Those are the things that tests like this miss, and I get pretty skeptical of them. (Especially skeptical of people who put their Myers-Briggs result in their profiles, though apparently only INFJs do that.) However, looking at the recommended jobs for Steady people, there was everything I have ever done or thought of doing. Okay, it may have a point.

We also did a brief segment on body language, and encoding and decoding, and how often people do these things unconsciously, but you can think about them. 

We were asked what we thought people's first impressions of us were, and what we wanted them to be.

A lot of people said "quiet".

I could come off that way, and it would not be telling the whole story, but there is some truth to it. What bothers me most is my habitual frown. My smile still flashes easily, but then when it fades, I am frowning like a cartoon frog. I hate that. I am not that unhappy.

(This was through video conferencing, so there was my face in the bottom of the screen, relentlessly.)

I looked around at the other faces, though, and actually, that is a kind of normal face. I just feel like mine didn't used to be so pronounced. Am I fooling myself? 

We were asked to think about what we want people to think about us. I guess I don't need people to look at me and think, "Wow; she's really happy!" What I settled on was that I want people to think that I am "good", in the sense of being a good person, and good at what I do. Trustworthy. Competent. Good.

Based on the frequency with which strangers ask me questions or for help, I may have achieved that. It could be a relief, except that I still think that I look too sad.

Maybe I have not really reconciled myself to the last five years yet, and the losses over that time. But maybe, I am still healing.

Or maybe I should just be really grateful for face masks.

Envisioning

Yesterday's post mentioned listening to your appetite. 

One story in Health At Every Size was about a woman who found herself mindlessly eating at night. When she stopped and listened to that urge, what she found was that she hated her job. It was mind-numbingly boring, and once home she tried to continue the numbing with a different technique. Having faced that, she started preparing for a job change.

In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo mentions that her client's lives often transform after the tidying. Often they change careers or start their own businesses.

If the environment and the body we inhabit are both things that we become accustomed to ignoring, given how much a job can dominate one's life, it stands to reason that there is a lot we shut out about our jobs. Focusing and listening might call for change.

Don't confuse familiarity with comfort.

As I started noticing these similarities, it made two books sections on envisioning your life seem more connected.

They are different questions. For tidying, it is about picturing your ideal life. 

In the manga, Chiaki remembered that she had chosen her apartment because of the kitchen. She wanted to come home from work, change into cute lounging clothes, and be able to cook or eat or socialize. Not only did a cluttered apartment where nothing could be found make that difficult, but she had forgotten that was what she wanted.

In Health At Every Size, the group members all had an idea of what their ideal life would be like, and it would be the one that would start once they lost the weight. Their process involved first checking to see if there were any ways in which their weight was protecting or helping them in some way. Then, they needed to examine if some of those goals could happen with their current body. Could they be more social, or more active, or travel, or have a relationship, or get a promotion, just they way they already were?

Maybe what you want is possible, but assumptions get in your way.

Maybe that is familiar, and almost comfortable.

But if that is where you are, what if that change that makes everything else fall into place never comes? 

Is your life good enough then?

Expanding gratitude

Reviewing some final things from Health At Every Size, I noticed some interesting similarities to The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

It was a phrase that had not suck out to me before, about thanking your appetite. 

Again, a big part of the book is listening to your body's signals, which want to tell you what your body needs. We can be very good at not listening, letting others tell us what we should want and need and deny.

Because we learn to think of our appetite as the enemy, thanking it sounds counter-intuitive; that appetite is what makes us want unhealthy, fattening food... except there is a lot of conditioning that goes into that. There can be wisdom in listening to your appetite, though it may take some sussing out.

It can be an interesting process anyway, to take something internal that you have tended to look down on or resent, and then appreciate it instead. It can set the stage for a major reset. 

And it was also a new thought, whereas I have thought many times about Marie Kondo's advice to thank the objects you discard.

There is a lot in her work that lends a certain energy and dignity to all of your possessions, including the ones you are letting go. There may very well be some shinto influence there, but it has occurred to me that it could function an important step for alleviating the guilt of getting rid of things. 

Most people end up discarding bags and bags of stuff that they don't really want or need. 

This gets criticized a lot, but the problem is not that people are not holding on to things that they don't want or need, but that they bought them in the first place. That may be more of an issue of a capitalistic, materialistic culture with its own issues (and certainly take advantage of ways to donate and recycle as much as possible), but going through and seeing all of that extra of yours can easily make people feel foolish and wasteful, and many other negative things.

Thanking these items -- for pleasure they brought at the time of purchase, or for representing a relationship if it was a gift, or even for teaching you what you don't want -- may be the step that heads off a shame spiral and simply moves into acceptance and forward in a process that is liberating.

We often talk about gratitude as helping with happiness, but that is often specifically gratitude to God or to the universe or something more general. As valuable as that is, there can be other types.

Extending appreciation to things you own and things that are part of you can also be transformative.

Music Review: Saving Abel

When bass player Scott Wilson followed me, I saw that he was in Tantric so reviewed them.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2017/04/band-review-tantric.html

Then I saw that Tantric was his former band, and he is currently in Saving Abel. My timing was just a little bit off, but I did want to rectify that. I am finally getting to it.

Saving Abel is a Southern Rock band from Corinth, Mississippi. 

While Wilson only joined them in 2017, the band has been around since 2004, rocking for some time.

Musically they remind me of Vertical Horizon, except that they are harder, and less sentimental. Is that a Southern rock thing? Perhaps at least partially. It may be that they only seem less sentimental because some of the songs are very much about sex with no allusions to making love.

I can appreciate them being to the point.

Although their last album release was 2014's Blood Stained Revolution, the band continues to play live regularly.

Profiles of individual band members were recently loaded to Instagram, and may be fun for fans.

https://www.savingabel.com/ 

https://www.facebook.com/savingabel 

https://www.instagram.com/thesavingabel/

https://www.youtube.com/user/SavingAbel 

https://twitter.com/savingabel

Making connections

I think my goal going forward is to spend some time writing about those things where we need to listen to our inner voices, and how and why, and certainly spending time relating it to capitalism.

My concern is that I am not going to have the time to do it well as I start my new job. (Which is for a corporation that provides health care, because I too must survive under capitalism, regardless of my familiarity with its flaws.)

So, I don't know how it will go. If I don't have a post ready to go the night before, I don't think I will be able to get one out during the day. I may start being really irregular again, though this time I hope because my life coming back together takes time, rather than before when it was my life falling apart.

It's a good thing I haven't really rebuilt my readership yet. 

For those of you who have been sticking around, perhaps you noticed that hesitance this week. I hope you also felt the sincerity and the love. Whatever I do, I will do it with integrity and heart, and I will overthink everything, I promise you.

Fortunately, as I rework my home space to take in my work PC and its two (!) monitors, I will have a lot to say about tidying. I always have things to say about health and my size. 

However, how those two aspects -- tidying (where keeping only what sparks joy flies in the face of consumerism) and fat (with the billions spent on diets and weight loss products) -- relate to capitalism is fairly obvious. 

Audre Lorde going against the advice of her oncologist -- choosing to visit an anthroposophy clinic and taking supplements rather than undergoing more probes, surgeries, and heroic measures -- may not have as obvious a relationship to capitalism. 

Though this quote is worth thinking about:

"What would it be like to be living in a place where the pursuit of definition within this crucial part of our lives was not circumscribed and fractionalized by the economics of disease in America? Here the first consideration concerning cancer is not what does this mean in my living, but how much is this going to cost?”

Yes, the way capitalism affects our possibilities for health is huge, in more and less obvious ways.

However, there is also something that may relate more to dominator culture (another topic that will recur) where some people will feel the right to exert authority over others. The doctor's training was a factor that deserves at least some attention, but which can't be definitive for the patient; we all know doctors who have been trained and still been wrong.

In Lorde's case, seeing a Black woman may have increased his sense of authority. There are some dangerous medical trends against both women and Black people, for what is researched and how and for how patients are treated.

(For more on that, see Doing Harm by Maya Dusenberry and Harriet A. Washington's Medical Apartheid. That's just for starters.) 

But racism and capitalism have this way of shoring up each other too, so it all connects.

Always.

Wish me luck as I start anew.

Books come together

I have to consider Audre Lorde's A Burst of Light in conjunction with two other books. No, it's really three.

It's because of the closet.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/08/tidying-up-my-closet.html 

Well, that sells it short. I went through the closet because of that Twitter thread, and the medical frustration, and there is stuff I have been working on for some time anyway.

Regardless, as I was remembering Marie Kondo's techniques from the manga, I thought that I should get around to reading the regular book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

What people (at least Westerners) frequently miss about the book is that it is not about minimalism, but about enjoying the things that make you happy. The extra clothes in my closet that I didn't want to wear were making it harder for me to find clothes that I did want to wear, and stressing me out. Getting rid of them was a relief to an extent that I couldn't have predicted.

KonMari recommends starting with clothes because it is easier to know how we feel about them. That is completely logical: clothes have both a visual and tactile effect and they are also likely to get feedback, which adds an emotional energy.

The less logical -- but true -- part is that we are not commonly in the habit of making our purchasing and furnishing and wardrobe decisions based on what brings us joy. There is advertising for that.

That is not even the strongest connection to Audre Lorde.

One thing that I was very impressed with was that by listening to her instincts instead of the doctor's recommendations (and there was a lot of studying that went along with those instincts, but the inner sense is still crucial), her outcome was really pretty good. 

She lived for eight years after her diagnosis, despite her doctor scolding her hesitance and inaction. It wasn't inaction though, just different action. 

It also wasn't one doctor. She had a good rapport with the doctor who had treated her breast cancer, and being able to talk with her helped. Still, the one who could know her body best was her. After all of the expert advice, that's whom she needed to listen to.

I mentioned trying to find something I had read on stress hormones and their long-term effects.

The problem was that I was sure I had read that in The Body Keeps the Score. I knew I was going to read that again, so I didn't take notes. When I did read it again, it wasn't there. 

I recently re-read some of the other suspects, Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World that Wants to Shrink You by Sofie Hagen and Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight by Lindo Bacon (previously credited as Linda Bacon).

It was not in either of them, but it was good to review them anyway.

While my concern was primarily about the eosinophilia, there was that reminder of the importance of listening to what your body is telling you, and the futility of trying any other way.

How good are we at listening to our bodies? Especially if someone is authoritatively telling us we are wrong?

I could be worse; I worked on that!

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/01/getting-back-in-touch-with-my-body.html

That doesn't mean it never needs re-work, especially when going through major life changes. 

But the question for everyone, then, is whether you are hearing your inner wisdom. If not, what are some steps to change that?

... but those hopes are faint

Yesterday I didn't know what to write, but I was feeling good will, so I wrote some hopes for you out there. 

Hopes that may not be realistic.

Well, it is totally possible that some of you had good days. 

There is a very good chance that your needs aren't being met.

For example, if you need prompt medical care, that can be a big problem right now. Maybe it's worse in Idaho and Texas, but even in Portland, there is some backlog.

There is a lot of economic anxiety (a term that people throw around recklessly, but it can still have a point). As much as we were told that money can't buy happiness -- which is true -- if the source of your unhappiness is unpaid bills for basic life expenses, money can do a great deal to alleviate that unhappiness.

Plus sometimes you just want a treat, but money may be so tight that it feels impossible, whether because it actually is impossible or just that you would feel too guilty.

And as much I hope that you like yourselves, I know there is a lot that works against it.

I want you to know that a lot of that is capitalism. Maybe not all of it, but some of it.

You have no idea how easily every thing I post could turn into an anti-capitalist screed. I refrain because I think I will be able to do a better job of that later, but the thoughts are there.

However, maybe the most important thing to stress is love. 

There are so many stories each day that make me think "I hate people", but ultimately, I don't. I keep coming back to feeling love.

I acknowledge "people" could use some improvement.

What I can do to help, I will.