Weekend Reading: The Early So I Can Rollerblade in the Sun Edition

Since last week's attempt to take a Friday rollerblading break didn't work so well (the rollerblading was awesome, but the coming back to work not so much), this week I'm going to try just finishing work early so I can go rollerblade. And that means you get your weekend reading early.

So without further ado, this week's links

I found this Matt Yglesias article about the book Democracy for Realists simultaneously fascinating and depressing.

Even more depressing: Mother Jones' investigation into how Trump took hate groups into the mainstream.

Josh Marshall has written quite a bit about this, too. Here is a recent post that is good, but scary.

John Scalzi's endorsement of Hillary Clinton is really thorough and well-thought out.

This Tenure, She Wrote post about the wider problem of harassment and misogyny reminded me of how often the guys in my classes "joked" that I'd slept my way to my good grades. I learned to laugh it off. I kept getting good grades. But these comments and the comments about how I won scholarships because I was a woman are definitely there in the imaginary trunk of horrible sexist crap I've put up with that I keep locked up in my head.

This horrible election has broken my imaginary trunk wide open. I suspect it has done the same for many, many women, which is why my timeline is full of women describing all the various ways men have assaulted them. I guess it is good that this is getting out there, but it really is emotionally exhausting. I am finding it hard to concentrate on my work or enjoy time with my kids. I've tried turning away, but the news leaks in. And it is too late, the trunk is open. And I keep looking at my 9.5 year old and thinking how soon all of this garbage is coming for her. I need to process the contents of that trunk so I can be ready for that. So, like I wrote yesterday, I'm trying to focus on the encouraging things I'm seeing, but it is hard. I have never wanted an election to be over so much.

I wanted to find some happier links to share. I don't have much.

Here's a story about some new cave drawings found in the Basque region of Spain. One of the bits of European language history that most fascinates me is Basque, which has no "relatives" in the language family tree. We can only speculate that at one point, before the Celts took over large swaths of Europe (and before they themselves were largely displaced by the Romans and the Germanic tribes), there were lots of people speaking a language related to Basque. And maybe they left us cave drawings! I think that is cool.

This is a nifty idea for a game.

I'm running my first ever giveaway on my Tungsten Hippo blog. It is for a novella the author calls "slapstick with B movie monsters." If that sounds fun, enter the giveaway.

This tweet about Bob Dylan's Nobel prize is perfect.

Literature purists right now are experiencing the same feelings of loss that chemists do every year a biologist wins the chemistry Nobel. 😫

— BetsyB (@betsyphd) October 13, 2016

And some grace to end on, courtesy of Bad Mom, Good Mom, who sent me the link: beautiful and fascinating photos of the flight paths of birds.

Also, a giant wombat kept showing up in my Twitter feed, so I'll share it with you:

World's oldest & biggest wombat weighs 40 kilograms & turns 31 years old today. Happy birthday Patrick. pic.twitter.com/LPqeOlTKPb

— Gautam Trivedi (@Gotham3) October 14, 2016

And now I'm off to rollerblade in the sunshine by the bay.  I wish I had more happy links this week. Feel free to add some in the comments if you have them!

Stepping Away from the Abyss

I am supposed to write a post about the latest book release for my publishing company. Small and Spooky is a collection of six classic short ghost stories. I was going to talk about why I put this particular collection together, even though I'm not really a ghost story sort of person, and then give you all the purchase links like I usually do.

But my heart isn't into it today, and so I'll just say the book is out and go check out the webpage for it for the purchase links and more info.

I'm finding it hard to write about my usual mix of topics. I knew this election would be ugly, both because having a woman running would bring out a lot of misogyny and because the Republicans nominated a very unpleasant man. But it has gotten so much uglier than I expected, with the racist rhetoric just continuing to ramp up, and vile hate groups moving from the fringes into the spotlight. In today's speech, Trump basically parroted white nationalists and neo-Nazis with a rant that was barely coded anti-Semitism. (Read Josh Marshall's post on it for details.) I find this terrifying.

And then the misogyny. This election is dredging up every bad thing that has ever happened to me because I am a woman and throwing it in my face. Michelle Obama's speech today described how this feels better than I ever could, so just go watch it if you haven't already.

I honestly want to crawl into a hole and ignore the news until this election is over. But that isn't a realistic thing for me to try to do. So instead, I'm trying to focus on the way I see people from all over the country and all across the political spectrum standing up to the way the Trump campaign is a corruption of our ideals. I mean, I never expected to agree with Eric Erickson on anything of substance, and yet here we are.  I see people speaking up and pushing back however they can. I see journalists like David Fahrenthold pursuing information to help show voters who Trump really is. I'm inspired by the people who took that awful "there will be a taco truck on every corner" quote and decided to have taco trucks help register people to vote.

I don't underestimate the threat of this moment in our history. I think Trump has unleashed forces he cannot control even if he wanted to, and I am genuinely worried about what is going to happen when he loses, as he almost certainly will at this point. (But don't get complacent! Vote! We need a landslide, both for our national honor and to refute the inevitable claims that this election was rigged.)

But I am heartened by the way people are fighting back.

I've also been thinking about what comes next. How did we get here, and how do we build up better protections against finding ourselves here again? I keep coming back to something John Scalzi wrote in his comment thread warning at the top of the comments on his scathing denouncement of Trump:

"But remember, lefties, there may come a time when you have the choice of voting for a legitimate shitshow of a candidate — someone who is an active danger to the fabric of the Republic — or missing out on 25 years of controlling the Supreme Court, or the Congress. And then you will be confronted with the gulf between what you should do and what you might end up doing, as many GOP/conservative people are this year.

Don’t pretend that all of you will do the right thing — or won’t rationalize the bad thing you will do as being a good thing, or at least, less of a moral capitulation than it is."

I agree with him. And it has me thinking that maybe part of the problem is the way Supreme Court appointments have become such a high stakes thing. Losing Congress is a short term setback, but losing the Court lasts for a generation. These days, that feels so high stakes to people on both sides of the political spectrum. I'm not enough of a historian to have an opinion on when this started, but it seems like our legislative deadlock is part of the problem. We can't resolve important issues by the normal political processes of compromise, and so they end up in the courts, and eventually in front of the Supreme Court, and since Supreme Court appointments are for life... well, I guess I understand why Republicans—particularly the ones whose main issues are on the sorts of things the Supreme Court ends up deciding, like abortion—are having a hard time accepting the idea that their candidate needs to lose. (And I'm sorry if you're still working on that, but at this point I have to say that he needs to lose. The last time the world heard rhetoric like his, the Holocaust happened.)

And that got me thinking about how unfortunate it is that abortion is such a big issue in our politics. I support abortion rights, but I would shed not a single tear if we got to a place where abortions were legal but extremely rare. That would mean that women had access to good birth control, and we had a society where an unexpected pregnancy was not likely to mean a tumble into poverty. That would be a wonderful thing!

So now I'm thinking that perhaps the thing to do to shore up our democracy is work to make the polarizing issues less high stakes. I don't know how to do that on all the issues, but I would be delighted to work to reduce the number of abortions to such a small number that it would seem silly to risk a President as manifestly unfit as Trump in order to get a chance for a Supreme Court that will outlaw it.

For the other issues, perhaps the thing is to contradict people who are disgusted by political dealing and the like. For most of my adult life, I've heard people blame our problems on "Washington insiders" and "people playing politics." Well, the Tea Party came along and refused to play politics. And then the Congressional Republicans refused to work with President Obama on anything. I don't think this is better, not at all. The way politics works is not pretty, but it is oh so much better than any other method we have of resolving differences in opinions about what our national policies should be.

The divisions aren't in Washington. They are in the entire US. We are a big, diverse country. We will never have consensus on most important issues. Instead, we need to accept compromises in order to continue to live together and benefit from the many strengths that our diversity provides us. So bring on the backroom deals. They are better than legislative deadlock and high stakes court battles. In short, hooray for politics! May we have more of it in the halls of Congress soon.

A Collection of Unrelated Things

Mr. Snarky has a cold, and I'm sure I'll get it soon. I can already feel my lungs working harder than usual, so probably I already have it and just haven't started sneezing yet. I don't know. There's a slim chance I'll avoid it, and since colds usually lead to at least a month of bad breathing for me, I'm clinging to that slim chance. I'll be heading to bed early tonight. I've been washing my hands like crazy, drinking lots of fluids, and sucking on zinc lozenges (yeah, I know, the data is so-so, but I think they help fend off and/or shorten colds, and I don't care if that's a placebo effect or something else, I'll take it).

I'd be in bed now, but it is my turn to do the dishes, and I decided to try to get the dishwasher to do most of them. So I loaded it up, started it, and am waiting for it to finish so I can load it up again. How did we get to a place where we often make two dishwasher loads of dishes in a day? (I can answer that, for today at least: Petunia has recently switched her lunch preference to left over Annie's peace pasta, and I made a batch tonight for this week's lunches. That, plus the bowl from the waffles we had for dinner will fill up half the bottom rack. The bowl didn't fit in the first run because of the blender I used to make smoothies to go with the waffles. And then there's all the lunch tupperware that can go on the top.)

So anyhow, I'm waiting for my dishwasher to finish and thought I'd write a post. Not about politics, because although I can't stop reading and retweeting about this election, it would probably be healthier for me to ignore it more than I am. Or at least turn my attention to the gazillion ballot initiatives, local races, and the like. I will apparently have a really long ballot to vote and would be smart to vote by mail. But the kids like coming to the polls with me, and I like letting them feel involved in the electoral process... so I don't know. I need to decide soon if I'm going to request a mail ballot. Maybe I will, and then the kids and I can drop it off at the polls on election day, as a sort of compromise.

Instead of politics, I give you a collection of unrelated things.

1. I got the dress that Leota sent me and it is awesome. One of these days, I'll get someone to take some pictures of me in this dress and in the two dresses I bought at Nordstroms and then I'll share them in one of my weird headless fashion show posts. I took a risk on the perfect wrap, even though wrap styles usually end up requiring a tank top to remain decent on me... and this risk paid off. From their size chart, I reckoned I would be a 1L, so that is what I ordered and it fits perfectly, and the wrap stays in place and doesn't flash obscene amounts of cleavage. Like I said, it is awesome. 

2. I've been making a push on book marketing over the last couple of weeks. I'm frustrated with Facebook, but they remain the ad option that works best for actually moving books. I'm frustrated with Amazon, but they remain the overwhelming lion's share of my sales. So I thought I'd ask you guys for new ideas. If you buy books and sometimes by books from indie publishers/small presses (i.e., presses that can't afford a NYT Book Review ad or the like): where should I be advertising? I'm particularly curious to know how Kobo readers and iBooks fans find their new reads, because while I'm starting to figure out some things about the Amazon algorithm, Kobo and iBooks sales are essentially nice surprises at this point. I have no idea what I do, if anything, that drives more sales on those platforms.

3. One of the nice things about Mr. Snarky is that he is open to essentially any genre of music and is always exploring and looking for interesting new things. Then he shows them to me during Friday Night Beers, and so I get to pretend I know about interesting musical genres, too.

Here is one of his recent favorite things, a genre called electro-tango:

There's electro-swing, too, and I find it mesmerizing to watch the videos that use old movie dance sequences:

But probably my favorite electro-swing video is an ad from Germany:

That seems a happy note to end on. And I suspect my dishwasher is done, anyway. 

Weekend Reading: The What a Week Edition

Thanks for all the nice comments on my last post. I still have a headache, but lying brain is done for the month.

Since I'm feeling happier, I decided to try something different today, and instead of quitting work early to go for a rollerblade, I went after lunch. It was a wonderful rollerblade- the weather is beautiful and there was a nice breeze and very few other people out. But it was a tactical error, because I had a hard time transitioning back to work. I think I can treat a short run as an early afternoon break, but rollerblading needs to stay something I do when I'm done working for the day.

Of course, the latest election news isn't helping me focus. I didn't think I could get more disgusted by this campaign, but here we are.

So anyway, let's have some links.

Jeet Heer wrote an interesting short history of cartoon characters as racial commentary.

Kate Marvel's personal essay about being a woman in science is beautiful.

Ijeoma Oluo's love letter to her kids' school district is also beautiful. Can we work to make all school districts like this, please? And thank you to all the teachers and administrators who are already working for that.

The Medieval POC tumblr is awesome for both the history and the art. Here's a recent post that I really love.

There isn't really anything new in this Washington Post about how to raise less entitled kids, but it is nice to have it all in one place.

Similarly, there isn't anything new in this post about the real reason women leave tech, but again, it is nice to have it all in one place.

This is just a great essay on data, big and otherwise. It would be my "if you're only going to read one link" pick this week, but then I'm a data nerd.

I am still trying to read and listen to the viewpoints of people I don't necessarily agree with. In that quest, I came across this article in the article in the Christian Post makes an interesting argument for Hillary Clinton as the best choice for people who really want to reduce the number of abortions in this country.

The Daily Show's response to that racist Fox news segment in Chinatown is great. (There is a lot of cussing, though, so if that bothers you... or you have kids around, you've been warned.)

Petula Dvorak on ageist misogyny and Hillary Clinton is worth a read.

Some self-promotion: my next taster flight will be out next week. It is a collection of classic short ghost stories, and I need advance readers. Querying reviewers was what I was supposed to do after my rollerblade.... so if you're interested, sign up!

Also, Academaze author Xykademiqz' post "A Good Little Girl" god reprinted in ASBMB Today. I wanted to boost my company's Facebook post about that, but Facebook is being a pill with boosted posts right now (it also failed to boost this post), so... if you have Facebook friends who might be interested, you could share it and that would accomplish something similar!

OK, almost time to go pick my kids up so I need to wrap up.... let's have something nice to end on:

This made me smile.

Petunia's really into Elephant and Piggie books right now, so this made me smile, too.

And here's some great music I discovered thanks to NPR (The World, to be precise). My favorite so far (I've always loved this song... but there are a lot of other great songs on her channel, too!)



Happy Weekend.

But It Is a Whingy Sort of Roar

I got my haircut today. I think I now have one of those "mom bobs" that the New York Times was so snooty about earlier this year, which brings my hair in line with all other aspects of my life in being disapproved of by the Times.

I think my husband agrees with the Times on this one. He liked my hair long, but I was increasingly unhappy with how long hair looked on me. Specifically, I don't think it was flattering to my face. Or at least, the type of long hair style that would be flattering to my face was proving to be too much work for me to maintain.

Which is why moms end up with mom bobs, I guess.

My husband will get used to the new hairstyle, and I don't give a damn if my hairstyle marks me as a mom, because I am a mom and why should my hair try to convince the world that I am not?

Of course, my husband's less than enthusiastic reaction to my haircut did nothing for my mood, which frankly, was already pretty grim. I am in the lying brain days of my month. I'm also still getting hormonal headaches. The sports drinks help: I haven't had a migraine since I started using them. But I do have roughly four days of constant headache. Drinking a sports drink and swallowing some ibuprofen takes the edge off, but I woke up with a headache yesterday, and it probably won't go away until some time on Friday. And of course, I still have the dull ache in my lower back and intense desire to eat cookies that has always accompanied my period.

I was grumbling to myself about all of this today, while I waited on hold to talk to the pharmacy and sort out the aftermath of my failed attempt to combine picking up my prescriptions with taking Petunia to her art lesson. But then the pharmacy tech took me off hold, and I managed to cross that task off my to do list. I actually powered through every single thing on my to do list, except "call for a car service appointment." Maybe I can get to that tomorrow.

Still, it was a pretty good day on paper. I got a lot done, despite my brain's attempt to convince me I am a loser and my body's attempt to get me to go back to bed. (Including posting the teaser page for my next Taster Flight, sign up now if you want to be an advance reader!)

But most of what made today such an achievement is invisible to the world, because we don't talk about the things that our hormones do to us, and how amazing we are that we get things done, anyway. We've been conditioned to think of those things as signs of weakness, not the signs of strength that they are. When I was growing up, the existence of our monthly hormonal cycle was often advanced as a reason why women shouldn't be in charge of anything, so we learned not to mention it, lest we remind people why we shouldn't be taken as seriously as our male counterparts.

Except it didn't work. No one forgot their biases because we didn't celebrate this aspect of our strength. So screw it. I was strong today, and I'll be strong tomorrow, and I'm proud of that.

I am woman, hear me roar. And I don't care if you laugh at my mom bob.