* Apparently this year is the 40th anniversary of American Girl Dolls. I was aware they'd been around for a while; I guess I was a junior in high school when they came out (I was too old then to want one; had I been eight or ten years younger I might have wanted one. I have long loved the idea of a doll or animal who has a whole wardrobe of clothes, where you can change their clothes).
I know the original company's sold a few times and things have changed; I seem to remember someone I knew with a daughter in that age range in the early 00s complaining about how the quality and customer service were declining (it has always ever been, I guess, in every category of retail)
But I do remember those early days. As a highschool and college student I did collect dolls (Most of my old collection is still packed away at my mother's and I admit I shudder having to go through it and dispose of most of them some how - I have no room to keep the collection, even all boxed up, now, and I'm actually not sure I want most of the dolls any more)
I remember there was a shop in the town my parents moved to that sold them, and I saw a few of the very-early-90s examples. (They also sold the VanderBears, I do have a Muffy Vanderbear and a couple of her outfits; perhaps I should retrieve her some time when I'm up visiting)
I also got the catalogs for a while. They were fun to look at - as I said, I always loved the idea of a doll or toy with their own wardrobe and accessories. (Way back when I was a tween and I had the Kermit the Frog doll that came out when the first Muppet Show was popular, I made him a wardrobe, with my mom's help - jeans, and a couple t-shirts, and a little suit, and a winter coat, and pajamas....). And the few fashion dolls I have now have that same quality. I don't change the clothes OFTEN (I am too busy to think of it a lot of times), but sometimes when I'm sad or overwhelmed by the world it is kind of comforting to go through the old hand-sewn Barbie dresses I've accumulated from Etsy sellers over the years and change the clothes on my "girls." (I don't have any Ken dolls. I've considered it, I've just never seen one I thought was fabulous enough, and of course, there are fewer clothes for Ken than for Barbie)
As I often say about these things: everybody wants a rock to tie a piece of string around. We take our comforts where we can get them these days, I guess.
* I'm still reading "Can't Spell Treason without Tea" by Rebecca Thorne. I'm enjoying it and trying to tell the prep-school-trained, tiresome, part of my brain to "shut up" when I feel like I should read something "more challenging" (I will get back to "Far from the Madding Crowd" eventually.
The thing is, this is a cozy book. Nothing too bad happens. Yes, Reyna has a bad infection from an injury that the local herbal woman has to work to heal, but you know that (a) this is the first book of a trilogy, (b) she's a main character, and (c) in these romantasy type books the author would not DARE kill off one of the two romantic leads.
Much of the storyline is Reyna and Kianthe planning out their bookstore/teashop and doing the steps necessary to renovate an old barn that was an outlaw hideout (And I suppose we'll have another "mild peril" subplot of the outlaws showing up again; I'm about 1/3 of the way through). And you know? a lot of the "stories" I tell myself - to calm down, to try to get to sleep - involve the idea of setting up a place to live and/or work, and all the details, and what nice little things I'd put into it, so that also is pleasant to read about.
(And as I said, I wonder if a lot of these are, as the booksellers call it, "Sapphic." I don't know if they figure that's the audience - though people who aren't, like me, read them too - or if this was heavily inspired by "Legends and Lattes," which also features a wlw couple. Or maybe authors feel like a man/woman pairing would get too unbalanced in the direction of him doing everything? I don't know)
I do think I'll read the others in the series when it comes out. I realize now that compared to a lot of people I read very slowly - and I think I read slower than I once did as my eyes have gotten worse over the years (I have an appointment this week to get them checked out; I'm hoping it's that I just need a new prescription)
It's also possible my academic career TRAINED me to read slowly; many journal articles are dense and difficult and if you want to remember what you've read you have to go slow, and that habit may carry over into the rest of my reading life.
*I've got other books on the way to me (so maybe I need to read faster, LOL). I watched Witness for the Prosecution on TCM the other night and there was a throwaway comment about Disraeli's wife being a good bit older than him, and I looked up a biography ("Mr and Mrs Disraeli: a Strange Romance") and it intrigued me enough I ordered it. I know kind of who he WAS, but I know relatively little about his time and what he did as PM. And I've got the new Becky Chambers book on the way. And Lindsay Fitzhugh's "The Sleuth-hound" which is about the doctor who was an inspiration for Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. I've had that one on pre-order for like a YEAR, I saw it mentioned on Bluesky and since I enjoy both history and Holmes stories (and yeah, okay, some of the slightly gross medical stories), I pre-ordered and I see it's on the way to me now.
*Witness for the Prosecution was pretty good. I had forgot Marlene Dietrich was in it - I knew Charles Laughton was as was Elsa Lanchester (and it turns out they were married in real life, which makes the scenes of her nurse character fussing over his ill barrister - the character had had a mild heart attack - all the more interesting to watch.
At the end of the movie, there's an old voice over on the credits, exhorting the people not to "spoil" a big plot twist for their friends who haven't seen the movie, and that was also interesting - I haven't been to a theater movie in years, do they still do that? Or do they thing it would bring out the oppositional-defiance in people and MAKE them want to spoil it?
*Other than all that, I am kind of seeking comfort. This has been a rough fall, between the "personnel issue" I alluded to, and some challenging students (not in the good way, not in the "they ask really interesting questions where I go "I don't know, I'll have to research that a little bit" way, which is the fun kind of "challenging" student). And just all the ugliness in the world being regularly shoved in my face; all the politics slop and I can't watch ANY network tv without seeing singularly ugly political ads (and I shudder to think what the 2028 ads may look like) and also just the ugly horrible things some people in high positions of power say. And I know, I know, I'm to sensitive, but it reminds me of every nasty teacher/coach/orchestra teacher I had in school, and some of the various peer-bullies I endured, and a couple of unpleasant administrators (who have left their posts, thank goodness) who made me feel "less than" on a regular basis. And it feels like it's all come to a head now and I regularly feel sad and small even as I know I'm doing the right things (last night: my church catered a dinner for the rodeo team on campus and the team from a nearby community college) and the kids* were all very polite and happy to be fed and have some time to just hang out and talk with each other before practice, and while my intellectual brain tells me this is a good thing, and I am helping put good out into the world, emotionally it doesn't feel like enough, or it doesn't feed me emotionally in the way I hoped it would.
I suspect it's sort of a trauma kind of like what I had right after 2020; it's a different kind, imposed by seeing a lot of ugliness in the world and at the same time, because I'm alone a lot, I don't always get a lot of positive interactions.
(*YES I can call them "kids," I am nearly 58 and if I had had babies early and my children had had babies early some of these students could be my grandkids)
Sometimes I think what I would really like would be someone to just sit with me from time to time and say nice things to me about me. But I also know I'd probably struggle to believe those things. But I do need to get more positive interactions in my life; I'm just not sure how. And more volunteer work probably ain't it - I'm awfully tired as it is and signing up to do more fetching and carrying or more emotional support of others feels like too much.
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