random (melancholyish) thoughts

* I suited up (Well, put on a darkish knit dress and grey tights - it was cold out) and went out to Dr. G's memorial service. I guess I'm glad I went even though it felt very long. A couple of observations:

- There weren't that many people there so it was probably good I showed up. He was 101, so I suppose much of his family and many of his friends are gone. (His wife pre-deceased him by five or six years)

- There were other people from my congregation there, and I sat with them. The main reason I went was out of respect: I remember what he did for us (despite being a different denomination) after the church split. He was already up in age (closing in on 90) but he helped out and even preached some Sundays. (His wife was our organist for years and years and years)

- All the people there from my congregation were people I think of as the "old stalwarts" - people (mostly women) who were already members and had been members when I moved down here in 1999.

- And then I realized with a shock: having been a member for almost 20 years (it will be 20 this August), *I* am probably approaching being one of the "old stalwarts." I.....don't know how I feel about that. On one hand, it feels good to know I stick with things ( I think of Trufflehunter from Prince Caspian: “I'm a beast, I am, and a Badger what's more. We don't change. We hold on.”) 
On the other hand: I'm not sure I want to BE one of the "old stalwarts" - the one people turn to in Board Meeting when there's some question of "what do the bylaws say" or "What did we do in this situation in the past" and it worries me because I don't like having that responsibility (and having to bear the blame when I tell them what we did in the past but it doesn't work out this time). 

I did not enjoy being young and relatively free of responsibility/other's expectations as much as I should have.

- There were also a couple people there who used to belong to our congregation, but left (one in a bit of a huff) over what was probably a misunderstanding and while my usual feeling is one of frustration with that kind of thing (cutting off ties instead of trying to work things out), I walked up to them and stuck out my hand and YES I take a little selfish satisfaction in that I was the first person to make the approach.

- I also saw one of my neighbors - one of the good and quiet ones but one I hardly see because our schedules are different. She is the one who warned me about "Don't let the city charge you for the new rollcart they left; I saw them drop the old one and it split in two" (They didn't, but I was glad she warned me)

- The secretary of our congregation had been asked to put together and read a short biography. And I learned something kind of surprising: He was the son of a sharecropper. I mean, I knew he was born 101 years ago (1917), but I didn't really think about...sharecropping still being a thing people did. And also, wow, did he manage to change his station in life - fundamentally, after his father died when he was fairly young, his mother remarried and moved, but he chose to stay in the home town. He dropped out of high school for a couple years, worked for the CCC. Then he went back, and got married, and went to OBU....and eventually earned a degree and was ordained. 

And I admit, this is maybe a little bit of my prejudice or something showing: but based on having known Dr. G. (Granted, only when he was retired and over 80, and not even knowing him that well at that), if you'd asked me "What did his father do for a living?" I'd have said either:

- a professor
- a minister
- a schoolteacher
- a doctor/dentist
- a small businessman

something like that. Not a sharecropper. And it is pretty amazing to see how much of a change in his SES Dr. G. had - largely, it seems, through all his own work (though he'd be the first to point out: his own work, yes, but lots of help from Above.)

- And I also wonder: is that kind of thing harder now than it once was? To go from a very poor background where maybe there were family difficulties, to a successful and comfortable adulthood? My mother came from a working-class family where there was never quite enough money (she once told a story about being sneered at by schoolmates because she didn't have a nickel to go get ice cream) to college, to grad school, to marriage, to being a professor's wife and being a professor herself....I wonder if mobility has become less. (And I would argue that both my brother's family and I may have experienced a tiny bit of downward mobility, in some ways. I know some of the things my parents seemed to afford comfortably require a little more careful planning and saving on my part)

* I'm also in one of my periodic cycles of dismay at human behavior, and stuff I see online. Lots of mob-mentality stuff, lots of piling on. Lots of "misery Olympics," where people talk about how their struggles are so much worse than the struggles of others, and if you don't check certain boxes in your identity, you don't have a right to feel like you have struggled or are struggling.

* And I think my feeling again is that in this comic strip, Linus got it exactly backwards:

My feeling is: I like and even love individual people. I can work with individual people. I can usually overlook their quirks or uncomfortable parts.

But put them in big groups? Forget it. Big groups are where you get mob mentality, and stuff like people deciding to gang up on another person*, pecking orders developing, people doing stupid mean stuff....people not trying to work things out. And other people basically saying "No, I don't want to even try because all those other people are Bad People" and you know? Everyone has bad and good in them.

(*I know that from the schoolyard. And I did it myself: tried to "look good" with a few of the girls marginally more popular than I was, I picked on a kid even less popular, and that's one of the great regrets of my life, that I wasn't stronger there)

And it frustrates me. I call myself an introvert because I don't like dealing with group dynamics, but I also get lonely when I'm away from people too much and I don't know. Sometimes being a hermit looks appealing but I admit I would want much more to be like the hermits in the Monty Python hermit sketch, where they have friendly chats with their neighbors and discuss how to fix up their caves....

It makes me sad though that so many people seem to still operate like it's seventh grade. Seventh grade was absolutely the lowest pit of Hell for me, and I have tried to leave it behind....

* And there are two other sorts of discussion I'm seeing online that just make me sort of sad and tired:

1. "Valentine's day is a holiday to celebrate romantic love so stop trying to turn it into a day for friendship!" or, worse "I think  of it as a romantic holiday so I'm creeped out by the idea of friends sending me cards" and can we please not?

I mean, I had JUST made my peace with the fact that I'll never have a romantic relationship again, and now to be told "NO. NOT YOURS" for the only "just for fun" holiday between New Year's (which I don't really celebrate) and Easter (St. Patrick's Day I also don't celebrate: I don't drink, I don't care for corned beef....). Why can't we let it be a little more inclusive.

Or, if we're not going to, let's go back to the 1960s, when it was, and I quote one of my cookbooks: "Mostly a holiday for children." Let the kids have their Spiderman valentines, and take the pressure off of people in couples to do some grand romantic gesture. Let people be able to get in to have a meal at a restaurant that day if they want. Stop selling marked-up crap that is pink and red or has hearts on it.

Feh.

2. The whole rethinking-Marie-Kondo thing, where people are saying "Stupid Americans! She didn't say 'limit the number of things you own,' she said 'think really hard about each thing you own and if you want to keep it!'" but I have seen screenshots from the show where she has people pile the ENTIRE content of their closet on their beds and then sort through things and you know? If I did that? I'd get the stuff out of my closet and then wind up sleeping on the floor for a week because I'd run out of time that day to sort, and then I'd be busy the next one, and not have the energy the following one, and have an evening meeting....

I've also seen screenshots where she's showing people a very specific careful way to fold clothes that "respects" the clothes and my reaction is "Bold of her to assume I actually fold my clothes." In fact, some times I put things on straight out of the dryer - I don't empty the dryer (except for the few items that wrinkle like crazy) until I need it for a future load. And what I can stick on hangers, I do. I have a crummy old dresser - the same one I had as a kid, from a "UFO" store that my parents painted that weird streaky 1970s "antiqued" style pinky-beige and the drawers kind of stick, and anyway, as an adult woman I have more clothing than I can comfortably fit in it, so....it's challenging.

I STILL say Kondoing your life presupposes a level of privilege many people do not have - whether it's knowing you have the money so that you don't have to have a "junk drawer" of stuff you don't have an immediate use for, but might have one in the future, or the time to do regular sorts of stuff (And big "deep" sorts like emptying the whole closet), or brainspace/energy to do that. My house is not as clean as I'd like it to be a lot of the time because I *don't have the energy a lot of the time when I'm done with work* or, alternately: if I cleaned house, I'd have no time and energy for even little bits of fun.

Also, for a lot of us - well the whole Marie Kondo thing smacks of "people are telling me how to live" and seriously, I have MET minimalist-livers who are super-smug about it and want to evangelize others. I don't care if you minimalize your lifestyle, great, if that works for you. But a lot of us have had a lot of judgieness dumped on our heads in our lives, so we're suspicious of things like this. 

I also know people whose parents would randomly just throw their stuff out - baseball cards, comic books, even toys and clothes, and I can see that kind of thing affecting you adversely.

* I'm still trying to limit sugar and carbohydrates to try to lose some weight but it's haaaard. I miss having dessert. (And no, fruit doesn't work). I've got chicken in the slow cooker and I have to heat up a couple vegetables with it but I admit I'm not feeling it that much right now. I'd rather have pancakes or something like that.