Bryce Moore's Blog, page 105
August 12, 2019
A Week at Fiddle Camp
Tomas just got back from one expedition, and off he and DC go on another. (For the record, Trek went very well, despite the fact that it rained buckets on them for most of the time, and they ended up coming home a half day early. Tomas said he had a great time, so yay for that.)
This week, Tomas and DC are at Fiddle Camp, a weeklong summer camp devoted to fiddle music and stringed instruments. We only became aware of Fiddle Camp a year or two ago, and both kids said they wanted to do it, and applied for scholarships to cover some of the costs. The scholarships came through, and we drove them up yesterday.
It was a strange sensation, dropping the two of them off at a place where Tomas knows a couple of people and DC knows just about no one (other than Tomas, of course). We took them each to their cabin (ten kids per cabin) and unloaded their bags, and then took them on a brief walk around the camp, and that was that. I figured they’d want us out of their hair as quickly as possible, so we grabbed MC and got back in the car for the drive home.
I went to several camps as a kid. CTY and Day Camp. I remember some of what I did there. (More at CTY than at Day Camp–was it at Deerkill? I can’t quite remember.) But I do think it’s helpful to kids to let them get away from their parents and do their own thing for a while. Of course. part of that process is hoping that “their own thing” is something that you as a parent approve of, but sooner or later you have to let them figure that out for themselves. I think we should have sent Tomas off sooner, though we probably couldn’t have afforded to do it in years past.
Anyway. I checked in briefly with Tomas yesterday evening via text, just to make sure all was going well. Got the thumbs up, so I’m assuming the best, and hoping they’re having a blast playing music, dancing, eating, swimming, and having fun. MC was quite sad to see them go, so we’ll have to see how this week goes for her. Entire families can attend. Perhaps Denisa will take MC next year. We’ll see.
For now, however, my family is down to three people at home instead of five. Whatever will I do with all that extra space?
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
August 7, 2019
Three Days of Retreats
I’ve got three days of library retreats in front of me. That might sound like it’ll be tons of fun to some of you. “Retreat” always used to bring to mind lots of fun images. Perhaps canoeing down a river, or maybe trekking across the fields somewhere picturesque. (In fact, the first retreat I ever had in Maine involved going orienteering, which was a whole lot of fun.)
I’m not going to say these retreats (one of which is two days, and one of which is one day) will be no fun at all. I’ve got friends who will be at both of them, and no doubt there will be laughter and food, but there’s also going to be meetings. Lots and lots of long meetings, full of sitting and talking. You see, these days, the meaning of the word “retreat” in my life has somehow changed to become synonymous with “day long meetings that involve free food.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of free food. (Perhaps too big a fan of it, if we’re being honest.) But I’m also not a fan of long meetings. Your brain starts turning to jello about four hours into a long meeting, which as around the time you realize at a retreat that you’ve got another four hours to go, and that resolution you made to stop at one brownie was pretty much laughable. You’re going to need five or six to get through this day.
“But Bryce!” you say. “You’ll be away from the office! Won’t it be great to have a change of pace? Mix things up a bit?” Typically, I’d agree with you. When the retreats line up in a row like this, however, I begin to feel a little daunted. Am I up to that much retreating? At some point, if you retreat too much, isn’t that considered a bad thing? Isn’t retreating cowardly?
The courageous thing to do would be to take a stand against retreat, I say. To plant my flag firmly in the soil and declare, “No! We’re not doing another one of these things unless it involves a canoe or a compass!” To stand like Gandalf before the Balrog that is twenty-one hours of meeting and boldly tell those hours to go back to the shadow. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn.
But who am I kidding? Not only do I not have the flame of Anor tucked away in a pocket somewhere, I’m fresh out of flags to plant. And to be honest, there are actually important things these meetings need to get accomplished. Will there be padding? Sure. But we’ll also get some good stuff done. It’s the price we pay for progress.
So forgive me if I’m blog silent the next few days. I’ll be stuffing my face with brownies and doing my best to somehow get through so much retreating. Here’s hoping I don’t just retreat in one big circle and end up right where I started.
Wish me luck.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
August 6, 2019
Keep on Trekkin’
Tomas is heading off on Trek this morning. If you’re a Latter-day Saint, chances are you know exactly what that entails. Well, maybe not *exactly*, but generally. I’ve never been on trek, so this is the first real experience someone in my direct family has had with it.
For those of you not in the know, Trek is a sort of modern day reenactment of the experience Mormon pioneers had in the 1800s as they went across the country with handcarts on their journey west. The first reenactment dates back to 1966, where Latter-day Saints from Arizona decided to travel out where the original pioneers journeyed, recreating the experience as closely as they could. This was followed by more efforts in the 70s, mainly with college-aged students. Journeys would go for almost 100 miles through the wilderness. (More information about the evolution of Trek can be found in this great op-ed.)
All of these people participating in trek reenactments made its spread almost inevitable. (If there’s one thing Latter-day Saints can be relied on, it’s to take a good idea and run with it farther than it was ever intended, sometimes to less-than-optimal results.) In 1997, with the 150th anniversary of the original trek, more and more youth groups followed suit, and today there’s an entire online guide for how to run a successful trek activity.
Originally, these treks were designed to be as historically accurate (and grueling) as possible. Youth were sometimes encouraged to fast during some of the experience, the thought being that having a difficult temporal experience might help them have an even stronger spiritual experience. That’s been back away from (perhaps due to instances where individuals have actually died on Trek), so Tomas is heading out in pioneer-era clothes, but he’s also stocked with regular hiking shoes, normal camping gear, and a good supply of Swedish Fish. I don’t believe they’re hiking more than 8 miles any one day, though that will be with a handcart in tow. (Participants are grouped into “families” of around 10 people each, and each family has its own handcart.)
I’m not entirely sure what I feel about trek. On the one hand, my ancestors were part of those original pioneers, and I really like the thought of doing something that shows us firsthand what they went through. I like historical reenactments, and the thought of doing one of those early treks in the 60s and 70s seems like it would be appealing. (I especially like the California Young Women’s group that did it, where they spent the year getting ready for it and really dove all in.) On the other hand, I feel like it’s gotten streamlined to the point where perhaps it’s no longer quite as impactful as it could be. There’s a fair bit of pressure to go on Trek, with youth strongly encouraged to participate. That makes me skittish. Ideally people go because they want to go, not because they’re expected to. (I did ask Tomas if this was something he wanted to do a few months ago, and he seemed game. I’m not sure how excited he was to go this morning when he left at 7am, however . . .)
In the end, I think it’s still a good idea, as long as it’s done well. My hope is he connects some with his history (even though he’ll be trekking through Northern Maine, a far cry from the plains of the midwest followed by the Rocky Mountains). Denisa and I were asked at the last minute if we could participate, but I already had three days of work meetings scheduled that I couldn’t get out of. I think I’d like to go at some point, just so I can see what it’s like firsthand.
Have you or your children done trek? What was your/their experience like? Tomas will be back Friday. It’ll be interesting to hear what he has to say . . .
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
August 2, 2019
Advanced Family History
Yes, two family history-related posts in about one week. Sue me. I’m on a bit of a family history kick right now. My goal? Find all of Denisa’s ancestors back six generations. Right now I’m four names short of having it complete to five generations, and 33 short of the sixth generation, but when I started this latest round I was 12 names short of five generations, and 45 short of six generations. I’m definitely making progress. (And back when I first started, there were gaping holes even in the third generation.
It’s been tricky work, as I mentioned in my post from last week, but I thought it might be interesting to show the sort of research I’m doing to get to the bottom of some of these names. A case study, if you will. Ready?
So my latest foray into the record books was focused on Maria Ferencova, Denisa’s great grandmother. I knew from family records that she was born in Košicka Nová Ves, a small town outside of Košice in Eastern Slovakia. Her parents names were Ondrej Ferenz and Anna (no last name). I had a birthday in 1896, and no death date. Familysearch.org has almost all the Slovak church genealogies digitized, but they usually start around the end of the 1700 and end around the end of the 1800s, depending on the town. Sometimes there are records for births, marriages, and deaths. Sometimes they’re incomplete. (I’m still not sure if that’s because they haven’t been scanned yet, or they just don’t exist.)
Bad news: for Košicka Nová Ves, the birth records end in 1895, so Maria’s record isn’t there to see. Worse yet, Familysearch had no listings for any marriage or death records for the town, so for over two years, I thought it was a done deal. I’d hit a brick wall.
Except then I thought there might be other records somewhere else online, so I started doing some digging these last few weeks. And after a fair bit of research, I discovered Familysearch has a different interface to search its records. I had been going through a location-based guide listed in each hyperlinked record, but they have an actual catalog you can search as well. (That’s great news for a trained librarian.) Going into the catalog, I found marriage and death records for Košicka Nová Ves. The marriage records ended in 1895, but that was okay, since odds were if Maria was born in 1896, her parents must have married in 1895 at the earliest.
Bad news: the records were in Hungarian. Worse news: they were in an almost impossible to read (for me) cursive variant. All I knew is that it was likely Maria’s parents had married in Košicka Nová Ves. I had no idea how old they were when they married. Was Maria their first child, or their last child, or somewhere in between? Had they married young? I didn’t even know if they’d stayed their whole lives in that town (though it was likely, from experience with the rest of her family histories). When you can’t read the writing that well, that can be very discouraging. It’s searching for a needle in a haystack when you’re only sort of sure there might be a needle there to begin with.
I went back to around 1850 with no luck. Pages and pages of scouring, and it had all come up empty, though I was still not sure I’d been reading the language right. After looking at all those pages, though, I’d gotten better at reading the cursive, so I decided to start from the beginning again. This time through, I found it.
[image error]Clear as mud, right?
You’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that says Andras Ferencz married Anna _________ on November 25th 1895. He was 25 years old. She was 21. His father was also named Andreas Ferencz, and his mom was Ersebet ________. Anna’s dad was named Andras, and her mom was named Anna. Last names were too hard for me to decipher from this. Ferencz was a unique name for the town, so I was very confident this was the right record.
Armed with that information, I went looking for birth records. I found nothing in Košicka Nová Ves for Andras in the five years before and after he should have been born, but for Anna _________, I found a much easier to read entry.
[image error]
Down that path, I ended up discovering her mom was listed as Anna Nagy in some records and Anna Lengyen in others. Same address. Same husband. Same first name. Only one marriage record for Andras Lihvar (also written Lichvar) and Anna Lengyen, however.
So that took care of half of Maria’s parents, but her father was still an unknown. While Ferenc was a unique name to Košicka Nová Ves, it’s a fairly common name in Slovakia. Doing a search for the name brought back too many records. Was there any more information I could get from the marriage record? What was that word next to their name?
I looked at other records to try and get a better feel for what was written there. It’s the town where they’re from. For Anna, it’s Kassaújfalu, which I only figured out after looking up the Wikipedia entry for Košicka Nová Ves and finding out it had a different name Hungarian. Knowing those words are Hungarian town names, what could the other be?
Googling got me nowhere. I was almost sure it was “Rozgany,” but nothing showed up. (It doesn’t help that town names can be conjugated in Hungarian, so the exact spelling was up in the air.) So I went to Google Maps and looked around Košicka Nová Ves to see what it might be.
[image error]
Up there in the right corner, you’ve got Rozhanovce. Wikipedia let me know it’s Hungarian form: Rozgony. Success!
Using my previously acquired skills, I searched the Familysearch records for Rozhanovce and discovered they were listed under Byster. I went into them and searched, confident I’d find the Andras’s birth record at last. Except I came up empty. Nothing there, which made no sense at all.
I did some more digging. Byster seemed too far away from Rozhanovce to make sense, and it turned out those records were Protestant, where the marriage record had been Roman Catholic. There was nothing else in the catalog for Rozhanovce, so I went back to the hyperlink method I’d started with, going to the Slovakia records as a whole, selecting Roman Catholic, and then looking at the place names around Košice and comparing them to towns around Rozhanovce. Košické Olšany is just to the south. What about that?
[image error]
There he is! Born on Groundhog Day in 1870. Let the celebrations commence.
Anyway. Maybe that’s way too much information about family history searching for what you signed up for, but I find the whole process invigorating and exciting. Each step is like that, where you’re searching for something that might or might not be there. There are disappointments, false leads, and frustrating developments, but when you actually use the clues and find what you’re looking for, it’s quite the thrill.
I have no idea how to do it in English record books, but if you need work done in Slovakia, I’m your huckleberry at this point.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
August 1, 2019
Debates Aren’t Debates
I sat down and watched some of the Democrat debate last night, but honestly I didn’t make it too far through it before I turned it off, since it was just aggravating me more than anything else. It didn’t work on so many levels, that I decided it warranted a blog post.
Allow me to elucidate.
For one thing, there are simply too many candidates for any real debate to work properly on the scale they’re trying to do it. Ideally, a debate would show me the merits and weaknesses of the different sides of the argument being debated. And there were certainly different sides being presented. Around healthcare, for example, there seemed to be different plans presented, as well as different ways to pay for those plans. Great! Except the entire thing stayed at a surface level, with no real arguments presented other than “that one will cost too much” and “that one doesn’t cover enough people.”
When there are ten people up on stage and all ten of them need to get air time, you end up with nothing more than a prolonged squabble. It’s all the worst parts of committee work, with none of the advantages. It wasn’t like that group of people were coming together with a goal of Coming Up With the Best Healthcare Plan. Rather, they were together to talk about why their own plan was the best and all the other plans stunk.
Which leads me to my second issue. Having a substantive conversation isn’t possible with that many people. I think you’d be able to pull it off with three people. Four is already stretching it. Ten is a joke. And to have twenty, split across two nights . . . Please. If they want to have so many different candidates, maybe they could arrange it in some sort of a March Madness Debate Challenge format, where they go head to head, and America gets to call in and vote for their favorite. (Honestly, the only drawback with that plan is how to restrict it so just registered Democrats get to vote, and limit it to one vote per person. While the thought of phone line voting makes me cringe, I don’t think it would be any worse that what they had going on up there last night, and I can think of many ways it would be better.)
Third, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the way debates are so tied into TV channels now. CNN designed the whole thing to catch eyeballs. It was set up like some sort of MMA or boxing match. I don’t think the questions were really designed to give us a good look at the different policies and thoughts being debated. They were designed to make as many confrontations as possible, with each candidate hoping to score some sound bites later on.
Meanwhile, all of this is going on while all I really care about is anyone but Trump becoming President. The only person I saw coming out as a winner last night was Trump. The more his opponents bicker and tear down each other, the less he has to do come next year. Ugh.
So count me out of the debates for now. All pomp, no substance. Once the field has been whittled down some, maybe I’ll give them another go.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
July 31, 2019
Everyone Has Flaws, Some Major
When I went to check the news this morning, I was greeted with a new-to-me (and likely you) quote from President Reagan, back before he became President. The unedited version just surfaced in the Nixon Library, and it’s from when then-Governor Reagan called President Nixon up after the UN voted to recognize China. Reagan was not a fan (to put it mildly) of the way the delegation of Tanzania celebrated after the vote, which he disapproved of. He said:
To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!
As a person who grew up admiring Reagan, reading this quote was more than a little unsettling. It’s so unabashedly racist, any which way you slice it. There’s no getting around that fact. For someone to think this, let alone speak it, says something about that person’s view of the world.
This made me think about the broader debate on who deserves to be honored with awards named after them, statues erected to them, buildings named in their honor, etc. Everything from Confederate statues to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award. Some have carried that argument forward, saying people like Washington and Jefferson shouldn’t be revered because of troubling issues in their past.
(A quick side note to say I believe there’s a huge difference between someone expressing racist thoughts in 1780 and someone expressing the same thoughts in 1980, and they should be weighed accordingly.)
The more I think about it, the more clear it becomes that any award or building or monument dedicated to any person runs the risk of having a PR crisis at some point in the future, because people are people. They all have flaws. Is it possible for a blatant racist to accomplish great things? Sure it is. Being a racist doesn’t preclude them from fighting Communism, for example. (It also doesn’t stop them from making bigger mistakes or bigger great decisions.)
On the one hand, I believe if we go around trying to clean up and sanitize all the monuments to men or women around the world, we’ll likely end up with no monuments at all. If we knew the totality of each individual’s life, I’m confident we’d find evidence to disqualify them for being honored. (Cutting some of you off at the pass here: let’s remove Jesus Christ from the data set, just to keep things focused.)
So is that, then, the solution? No naming buildings? No making monuments? I don’t think so. I think naming something after someone only becomes problematic when we begin to put the person up on the same pedestal his monument rests on. But I also think that simply the act of erecting a monument or naming an award doesn’t equate to endorsing everything that person ever did, thought, or said. Down that path, no one’s recognized for anything. And recognition is important.
Why? Because it’s what helps us strive to be better. Seeing someone take a stand or break a world record or overcome some obstacle can inspire us to know that more is possible. The monuments and the awards are for the specific things those people accomplished in their field.
So my thinking on this has changed some since I first encountered the concept of tearing down memorials to flawed individuals. Not that I don’t believe there are some memorials worth tearing down (I still think there are), but rather that we need to be conscious about the greater place of that memorial or award. The context of where it sits, who it influences, what it endorses, and how it came to be.
Do I still admire Reagan? Sure, for some of the things he did. But I know for a fact he was racist, and that changes my evaluation of him as well. Do I believe we need to rename Reagan International Airport? Probably not. But my estimation of him as a President has already gone down a fair bit over the years, and this recent revelation has caused it to sink further.
I don’t know . . . I’m still processing some of this. Maybe it was all old news to some of you, but it was new news to me. What are your thoughts around this whole topic?
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
July 30, 2019
Surrounded by Piles
I’m used to being surrounded by piles. As an author and librarian, I’ve always got a stack of something somewhere that needs to be gone through and sorted, or is waiting to be consulted later on. Sure, sometimes the piles are virtual (unread emails or tabs in my browser), but they’re no less real.
Lately, however, I’ve been surrounded by quite a few different types of piles. We’re tackling new territory in home renovation: landscaping. I’ve discovered that this is pretty much a never ending process of getting new piles of stuff dumped in your yard, and then trying to find places to put it all.
Technically, the piles started with the wood pile. We had a big silver maple cut down in our backyard last year, and it was cut and split into a huge wood pile that needed to be stacked. We had to wait for the wood shed to be renovated before we could begin stacking it. In the meantime, Denisa has had plans for a flower bed in front of the house, where our wood porch used to be. It seems like such a straightforward project.
It lies.
First, you need to have a place to plant the flowers. That means dirt. I thought we had dirt there, but apparently it was the Wrong Kind of Dirt, so we needed to have someone come and dig out the bad dirt to leave a spot for the Right Kind of Dirt to go. And what a mound of dirt it was. Put some snow on that thing and you could sled down it. And it had to be moved around to the places where the bad dirt used to be.
Except there wasn’t really a spot for that yet, because what good is a bed without a wall for it to nestle in? Denisa wanted a fieldstone wall, which meant we needed to get some fieldstone, which meant another pile appeared in my yard, this one a big jumble of rocks. All those rocks had to be moved and organized and stacked into a neat wall.
But wait. There’s more. Because I guess you can’t just put dirt down underneath where the rain runoff will be coming from the roof. Never mind the fact that we’d had dirt there before. That was Bad Dirt. Good Dirt needs special attention. It runs away when runoff comes. So we needed to put pea gravel right next to the house to deal with that problem. I thought I could just get some bags of it, but it turns out landscaping is always cheaper by the pile.
So now we had a big pile of pea gravel dumped in our front yard today.
Denisa’s working on the stone wall. The wood is close to being finished. We have to put the pea gravel next to the house, and then we can put the rest of the dirt down. With the leftover dirt and fieldstone, we’re looking to build another bed around the screen house.
I’m about piled out, to be honest. Hopefully today was the last pile to arrive. I dream of a day when all the piles are gone and we just have a normal front yard again. Is that too much to ask?
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
July 29, 2019
How to Stop Being So Judgmental
I can’t imagine I’m the only one out there who has a bad tendency to judge other people. It’s something I’d rather not be doing, but it’s a bad habit that I have a hard time putting behind me. There are areas where I make snap judgements about a person based on their actions. In some cases it’s justified, but in many (most?) cases it’s not.
That’s why a quote I read this week stood out to me so strongly. I’m reading Dare to Lead as part of a book group on campus. There are some aspects of it that I’ve found less than useful, but there are some really good ideas in parts of it that have stuck with me. For example Brene Brown, the author, talks about the different nuances of shame, guilt, and embarrassment. Embarrassment is typically momentary, and often a shared experience. We do or say something stupid, we feel bad about it, but we know and recognize many other people have done or said the same thing, and we move on.
With guilt, the thing we did or said (or didn’t do or didn’t say) is more significant. We feel genuine remorse for our action or inaction, and that remorse spurs us to improve in the future, so that we don’t feel guilty anymore. I’d always thought of guilt as a bad motivator. I’m not saying it’s the best motivator out there, but I’ve come around to believe it’s a good feeling to be capable of having, It makes us want to be better people, but it does that because we feel guilt for our actions, not for our character.
Shame, on the other hand, comes from feeling bad about who we are as a person. As Brown says, “the majority of shame researchers and clinicians agree that the difference between shame and guilt is best understood as the difference between ‘I am bad’ and ‘I did something bad.'” You feel guilt when you did something bad. You feel shame when you think you are bad. Shame leads to destructive behavior.
This sets the context for the specific quote I want to highlight:
Based on research, there are two ways to predict when we are going to judge: We judge in areas where we’re most susceptible to shame, and we judge people who are doing worse than we are in those areas.
The thought is so compact it almost sailed past me when I was reading it. I had to stop and read it again, then think about it for a while to understand what she was getting at.
Each of us is susceptible to shame in different areas. For example for me, weight has always been an area where I’ve felt shame. (Just keeping it real here, folks.) Other people might feel shame about their intelligence, their looks, their job, their temper, their relationships, and so on. Any area where society has caused us to believe we’re supposed to be X, but we know we’re actually Y. As Brown puts it, “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.”
We are most likely to judge other people, then, in areas where we ourselves are most susceptible to shame. I might have a tendency to judge people because of their weight, because I personally feel shame about mine. And when we do judge in these areas, we judge those people who are doing worse than we are.
It made so much sense when it was outlined like that. We naturally try to defend ourselves in the areas we feel weakest, and one of the instinctive ways to do this is by diverting attention to people who are even weaker than we are in those areas. If we feel our relationship is bad, we judge people with even worse relationships. If we’re self conscious of our social status, we pick on people who are lower than we are.
Now that I’ve read that, I’ve tried to consciously catch myself whenever I start rushing to judgement. I turn the feeling inward instead of outward. Why am I judging in that case? What is it about myself that makes me want to feel superior in that area?
I’m not saying I’m perfect at this new approach by any means, but it’s been a significant mind shift for me, and I wanted to pass it on in case it might help you as well.
(Because you know I’m judging you because of how awfully judgmental you are . . . )
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
July 26, 2019
Further Adventures in Stocks
After my success with Square stock a while ago, I decided to give it another go back in April of last year. At the time, Facebook’s stock had plummeted in price, and it seemed like a great opportunity to buy some, since (back then) I figured Facebook would be around for quite some time to come. The only problem was that it was more expensive than I would have liked; I could only afford 4 shares at $153.64 a piece, investing a grand total of $614.56.
For the first while, it seemed like I’d made a really great purchase. By July, the price of the stock was up to $207, meaning I had made over $200, increasing my investment by over a third. Yay!
Then Facebook got hit with lawsuits and penalties for a string of stupid decisions, and I saw the stock drop all the way down to $125 by December. I’d lost almost 20% of my investment. Boo!
The stock has had a rocky road to recovery, clawing its way back above $200 again at last, and I’ve taken my earnings and cashed out. I still think it’s likely Facebook’s stock will increase some more in the future, but I no longer have confidence that it’s going to be around indefinitely. I guess in the end, I just decided the Facebook stock ride was one I didn’t enjoy, and so I decided to get off while I still could.
On the other hand, my last experiment (Square stock) is now up to over $80, so if I had stuck around back when I sold my stock at $45 or so, I would have almost doubled my money by now. I still don’t regret clocking out when I did. I needed the funds then, and I had tripled my investment that time. Will the same hold true for Facebook? Possibly, but I think I might take a bit of a time out from individual stocks for right now. I look at the Dow Jones, and it just seems awfully high to me . . .
That said, I have nothing to complain about from my time working with stocks, and I’d say it’s likely I’ll give the wheel another spin if and when I find the right company to invest in. If nothing else, it gives me another thing to check each morning when I start my day. Kind of like a sports team that you have an actual stake in.
Got any hot stock tips for me to look into?
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
July 25, 2019
To DNA or Not to DNA?
I’ve gotten more and more into family history over the past several years. Not my own, typically. Most of that has already been done by my extended family on all sides. (Latter-day Saints are pretty gung-ho about family history, and I come from “pioneer stock” on both my mom and dad’s sides. Finding actual new ancestors on those lines is like playing a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos.)
No, I’m much more interested in Denisa’s side of the family. She’s a convert, and so it’s all fresh snow as far as they eye can see. (Or to extend the metaphor from earlier, I’m the only hippo in a sea full of marbles.)
Of course, it’s not all smooth sailing. The Slovak and Czech church record books have mostly been digitized, but they’re spread all over creation, and they’re written in Latin, German, Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian. Often they’ll switch languages in the middle of a page, even. And each language handles names differently. So what’s Georg in one is Gjgj in another. Last names are even more complicated. But that’s part of why I like it so much. It’s a real challenge, and a lot of fun to do research in,
But I digress.
I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a DNA test done, and I wondered if any of you people out there have done it (or consciously *not* done it). Up to now, I’ve held off out of caution. Once your DNA is sent off to a company, what sort of control do you have over what’s done with it? Can it be sent to law enforcement? Can they sell it to other companies? What do those other companies do with it? I know the laws aren’t exactly iron clad in this area right now, so part of me wonders if I shouldn’t wait until that uncertainty is smoothed out.
But on the other hand, a big part of me then wonders why in the world I should care about all that. If someone wanted access to my DNA, it wouldn’t be hard to get. All they’re taking is some spit. I’ve got plenty of that, and it’s not like I guard it like Fort Knox. If a shady government organization wanted to get their paws on some Bryce spit, I’m fairly confident they could do it without even needing to resort to any Mission Impossible-style antics.
And yet then there’s the question of whether I’m liable for what I discover. If I find out I’m susceptible to a certain type of disease, would my insurance company potentially deny coverage to me if it turns out I could have done something to be better prepared to handle that disease? I have no idea.
All that uncertainty brings me back to the central question of why I’d want a DNA test done in the first place. Is it basically just a “I wonder” itch I want scratched? What would I actually do with it once I had the results?
That’s where all of you people come in. Anyone want to volunteer their experience with DNA testing if they’ve done it? Were you happy with the process, or do you regret it? I’d like some feedback from people I actually know, instead of the faceless internet horde.
Please share!
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
