New to me

I guess Pip Lincolne has been blogging for a while, but I had never seen her blog. (And granted, some of the posts look like those "hey here's cool stuff to buy" posts that I tend to gloss over). But it looks like she has a nice life, and it might be interesting to read.

What got me over to the blog was the link to her essay The Middle Matters, Too. And yeah, this sums up some things I've noticed about online - and heck, about life in general these days. Everything has to be The Best or The Greatest. Whatever. Or the other superlative: The Worst. The Most Boring.

I get that the The Best pieces are aspirational, to try to tell people that yea, there IS someone out there (apparently) living their Best Life, and so maybe you should strive a little harder too, or....alternatively..."sucks for your circumstances" because sometimes circumstances do prevent a person from having what they want in life.

I'm not quite as sure about the other end - is having a The Worst meant to be cheering, like "at least your life isn't this"? Is it like my friend in grad school who said she watched The Jerry Springer Show because "no matter how much my life is in the dumper, I'm doing better than some of those people"? Or is it a point-and-laugh thing, or that same inclination that makes you shove a carton of milk you think has expired under someone's nose and ask them to sniff it?

I have more experience with seeing, and disliking, the The Best Ever Lives stuff. Because I've talked before about how I dislike the Superstar (or Rockstar) mindset. We don't need a few deucedly-brilliant people doing everything well - we need everyone to have something they do competently and that they enjoy (or even something they're not that good at but that they enjoy).

(The link came from a Metafilter post talking about the saying "the good is the enemy of the great" which seems a bastardization of the one I always heard, which is "'Perfect' is the enemy of good" meaning if you're a perfectionist and you keep working on something, either you never finish it, you miss your 'window' on it, or, you overwork it to the point that it's actually LESS good. And someone else pointed out that "the good is the enemy of the great" is a terribly insidious phrase, because it also can lead to stuff like the "Always Be Closin'!" mentality, or the mentality that for a business to survive, its workers must be accessible 24/7, or that you should not just go the extra mile, you should go the extra 20 miles of additional unpaid unthanked work....and that may be what's killing a lot of us).

But another post on the blog caught my eye: comfort reading. I was thinking about this, given my very recent re-reading of "The Hobbit" (as a way of trying to distract my mind at bedtime from stuff that's worrying me, mainly the looming medical thing). But then I thought - what are my other comfort reads? I admit, I am not a big re-reader, but I do re-read some of the Inspector Alleyn mysteries, and some of the Albert Campions. Because for me there is a very specific comfort in returning to a character I like, and especially in mysteries - which, fundamentally, are stories where being observant of your world and being intelligent are celebrated - the detective character is enjoyable to read about.

But also: many books from my childhood. (Well, of course: "The Hobbit," but also the Narnia books, and the Moomin books, and The 101 Dalmations, and "A Wrinkle in Time")

I think to be "comfort reading" a book has to be one you're RE-reading, so there's no risk of bad surprises (sympathetic character getting killed - that seems to be stock-in-trade of some modern mysteries) or doesn't require too much hard thought. Though I will say for me, another class of "comfort reading" is what you might call "pop" or "layperson" non-fiction - either popular history (and yes, I know, I can hear the Historian Eyeballs rolling from over there, but I do try to look for biases and read a variety of authors) or popular science that is slightly outside my field.

Right now I'm reading a book on the aurora borealis (Lucy Jago's book - it's more about the process of learning and writing about them than it is very much about what they are). Part of it is the history-of-science thing, part of it is, I admit, the vicarious thrill of reading about Birkeland and his team living through an extreme northern winter. I will say it's not the HAPPIEST book ever - early on, one of the team has to quit (and loses his dream of becoming a surgeon) because he develops severe frostbite and has to have his fingertips amputated, and another member of the team dies in an accident, and apparently Birkeland had his own personal demons (I am not all the way through the book yet, though). But somehow, it is comforting to read because....well, it's DIFFERENT from the life I am living right now* and it also does contain within it the idea of people fighting against very difficult odds to do something important, people taking some kind of a risk**

(*This is why I always side-eyed the educational 'advice' that kids need to read books with protagonists Just. Like. Them. all the time. Yes, okay - I get that representation is important. But it's also important to see lives UNLIKE your own, and to also have the mental escape of learning about different times and places. If I were only given books about middle-aged single women working what are more-or-less office jobs to read....well, I wouldn't read. Because I live that and it's boring to read about what you live all the time)


(**Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason we fight online about such petty stuff is that we don't have, most of us, big struggles we're trying to work on. Or, perhaps, the big struggles of our time are utterly intractable for individuals to work on, so instead we default to something like arguing over New York style vs. Chicago style pizzas. Though sometimes.....I will admit those discussions can be entertaining (e.g., "What defines a sandwich?") But the sort of arguing where you attack someone for having an aesthetic opinion slightly different from yours, and you get your friends to try to attack them, too....nope. I'm even not all that comfortable with the joking "well, you're an idiot if you like that" thing because I am literal minded enough that sometimes I go, "Wait, does that mean the person really does think I'm an idiot and likes me less?")

She also seems to have periodic "cheering-up linkfests" that fall under the heading For when you're feeling a bit s*** and yeah, as the cool kids say, big mood. (And I suppose that feeling a bit... could be physical (I am still achy today, though I don't know if it's because it's stupidly hot and humid out and it's triggering hives everywhere, or if I did have a virus, or if I hurt myself on the last workout I did)

And yeah, there's a whole archive of these that I'll have to look at at a time when I'm not actually yammering at myself that I Need To Do Work.


Oh, and she also has a whole sidebar linking the crocheting she's done, and I assume there are patterns.