Grocery shopping day! The last time I went was before Inauguration Day, and I could see/feel a LARGE CHANGE in my attitude from one trip to the next. Last time I was thinking, “What if the government collapses, and the violence and the pandemic continue on year after year? Should I be stocking up on more flour/yeast/beans? What is the right amount of canned goods for an Armed Insurrection?” This time I was relaxed: “This won’t go on forever! The end is in sight! I do not need another flour, because I have plenty! Soon there will be cleaning supplies again, so I will not worry about it!”

And, like a dove-fetched fresh-picked olive branch showing that the flood waters were indeed receding, there were small cans of Lysol disinfecting spray! and ABUNDANT paper towels filling not only the shelves but part of the aisle floor! and BRANDED HAND SOAP!

We still appear to be experiencing the national Grape-Nuts shortage, but I feel that’s survivable.

They had some little Hickory Farms sausage/cheese holiday gift sets marked from $10 down to $3, and I stood there frozen and indecisive until I gave myself a little shake and said “IT’S A MATTER OF THREE DOLLARS, JUST BUY ONE.” Ditto for NEW! Pretzel Pop-Tarts. Yes, it’s obviously a big lifestyle decision, but let’s not stand here breathing the air for any longer than necessary.

I had a mask panic on Twitter the other day, and several people advised wearing TWO masks: the disposable non-surgical kind first (I have a box of those left over from my days as an in-home elder caregiver), with a cloth mask over it. I tried that today, and it worked well: I didn’t notice a difference in how well I could breathe, I only noticed I felt a little more humid/itchy around the edges of the mask. Well worth it.

There was a guy wearing his mask fully on his neck in this The Year of Our Lord 2021, 11 months into a pandemic. I considered making a faux-panicked remark (“Sir!! Your mask!! It’s slipped!!!”)—but my assessment was that anyone blatantly not wearing a mask in January 2021 knows what they’re doing and is hoping to pick a fight.

I CRAVE YOUR GROCERY NEWS.

I was so worried that Something Bad Might Happen yesterday, I couldn’t write any posts, because I winced to think of us talking happily/optimistically, and then having Something Bad happen and those happy/optimistic things still posted, and anyway now that yesterday is over I feel like MomQueenBee stretching out in a comfy position that doesn’t hurt anymore, and also like Mimi Smartypants done throwing up but still shaky and weird and not able to do much. I’ve seen many other people remarking on the phenomenon of how all of us are MARVELING at things that ought to be normal: a non-combative, accurate-information-giving press secretary; a president who takes the actions available to keep the country’s citizens from dying unnecessarily; not having to wake up flinching about what latest terrible/revolting thing the president might have done/said while we were asleep.

I could hardly believe that the inauguration happened, and that no one died from it. And then the man who was president yesterday morning was suddenly No Longer President, and there was no longer any chance for any “Oh, whoops, actually he still is” to happen. He didn’t manage to collapse the government/country. And as many, many people are reminding us, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen (and in fact it’s MORE likely to happen, now that it’s been shown how close even a bungled/inept/unsophisticated attempt could come)—but it didn’t happen THIS time. (*gif of Moira Rose saying “Let us CELEBRATE that”*)

I appreciate our new president’s urge to have unity, even though I don’t think it’s possible/reasonable to unite us all; it’s just that I appreciate having a president who WANTS that, instead of a president who wants us to fight to the death in a gladiator ring for his entertainment. But we CAN’T unite with certain viewpoints, when those viewpoints are not just Different but Inherently Wrong/Bad. And so what I REALLY appreciated was the much-less-emphasized part where he mentioned the concept of Enough Of Us. That the reason the United States has pulled through other really bad situations was that ENOUGH OF US wanted to get through it. Not that we UNITED with those of us who thought slavery was great, actually—but that ENOUGH OF US thought it was wrong and we shouldn’t have it. Not that we UNITED with those of us who thought women shouldn’t be able to vote or own property or leave their abusive husbands—but that ENOUGH OF US thought women should be legally equal to men. Not that we UNITED with those of us who thought that God hates people who are gay or transgender, but that ENOUGH OF US thought that people are people, and love is love, and that that’s not an appropriate use of the concept of God, and so forth. And now: not that we UNITE with those of us who have shocked us over the last four years with their cruelty and bigotry and violence and selfishness, but that ENOUGH OF US want to live a different way. (IF enough of us DO.)

I have a long and, if we are to draw any conclusions from Paul’s glazed-eyes reaction to even the brief summary, rather boring story to tell!

I recently bought myself several Demeter Fragrance Library samplers on sale. I have been trying them. Yesterday I tried a scent called Fuzzy Sweater, which reminds me of some of the perfumes I wore in high school. The one that came floating to mind was Chantilly, though I don’t remember what it smelled like so I can’t really say if it DOES smell like Fuzzy Sweater; the name Chantilly was just stored in the same part of my brain that categorized Fuzzy Sweater as a High School Perfume.

That led to a feeling of nostalgia for Chantilly, and also curiosity to remember/know what it DOES smell like. I remember it being inexpensive (anything I wore in high school was inexpensive), so I looked it up, thinking I’d buy a bottle for $10-20ish and have the fun of trying it again.

Well. WELL. It turns out, the whole topic of Chantilly is fraught. FRAUGHT! You can find message boards online where people are discussing their STRONG and VARIED opinions, as well as confusion in the face of other people’s opinions! Some people RHAPSODIZE about [one particular scent note] while others claim to be unable to perceive anything except [other particular scent note], and then there is further discussion about whether those particular scent notes are GOOD or BAD; there is also an entire sub-topic about whether it is An Old Lady Perfume, and what does that mean anyway (and I mean ACTUAL ANALYSIS of what it might mean, in terms of the various elements of fragrances—not just huffiness).

And gradually I became aware of another issue, which is that people might be talking about DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF CHANTILLY. If I am following the saga, the maker changed at Some Point. I wearied of research before being able to discover WHEN this happened, but interestingly, the bottle shape I remember is right in the overlap between makers. That is, there are bottles made EARLIER by Houbigant that look very different from the bottles made LATER by Dana, but in the middle there is a particular bottle shape that (1) was used by both, and (2) is the bottle I remember. It looked like this:

(image from Amazon.com)

So! WHICH KIND DID I USE, HOUBIGANT OR DANA?? Furthermore, in the same part of my brain where I store the memory of Chantilly, I store a vague feeling of disappointment. Such as: I’d tried the sample bottle many times in the store, then finally bought a bottle, and felt it wasn’t as good as the sample. And/or: I bought a small bottle to start, loved it, finished it, bought a new bottle, and it wasn’t as good. That kind of feeling. And yet I DID wear Chantilly for years, so it wasn’t THAT disappointing. But still: maybe the sample/first bottle was Houbigant, and the bottle I bought / second bottle I bought was Dana!! Depending on which of those memories, if either, is accurate!

I started poking around on EBay, which is a great place to buy old perfume and also a terrible place to buy old perfume. The prices vary wildly! Shipping varies wildly! With or without box! What percentage full! Etc.! And I am sure the site is just PACKED with fakes. Like, WOULD someone have a new-in-box bottle of Chantilly from decades ago? BUT MAYBE THEY WOULD! Sometimes people receive perfume as gifts and never use it! Or sometimes they buy ahead: I myself have a new-in-box bottle of Charlie that I bought YEARS ago on clearance for when my current bottle of Charlie is empty, but that day may never arrive! (Though I am wearing Charlie today, because now I am in the mood for perfume I wore in high school.) Plus I have several new-in-box bottles of various L’Artisan perfumes that were being discontinued, because I knew if I didn’t have another bottle waiting I’d hoard what remained of my current bottle. And there is the concept of Old New Stock, where apparently a bunch of stuff is found in an old warehouse! But also: I would expect fakes to be new in box, so perhaps I should stick to the partially-used bottles which seem more likely to be real. It’s not as if I am going to keep the box! (But on the other hand it’s so appealing to have it!) You can see how all this easily absorbed over an hour of time.

What I did was, I just kept putting candidates in my cart until I felt tired of browsing. Then I sorted them into two heaps, Houbigant and Dana. And I tried not to overthink it, but did overthink it a little anyway, but no matter, because I felt happy with the decision: I ended up ordering two used/partial bottles of matching sizes; one has the box and one does not; both had free shipping.

I am excited for them to get here! I hope they don’t smell exactly the same and also not good!

…Sigh. While proofreading, I took one more stab at finding out when the switch from Houbigant to Dana took place, and found there is also apparently ANOTHER switch to New Dana. Which is unfortunate, because I see the Dana bottle I bought is actually New Dana, but feel too worn out to find out if that matters or not—and yet, certainly the kind I used was NOT New Dana—but very likely New Dana is a name change ONLY, and there was no change to the formula. (Although…”New”…maybe that specifically means the fragrances were updated.) I tried to get myself interested in starting the whole process over again and buying a Dana bottle, but then noticed that I’ve been neglecting to take into account whether the bottles were eau de toilette or eau de cologne or eau de parfum, and I don’t remember which one I had in high school ANYWAY. Since I remember it being cheap, it was probably eau de toilette—but maybe THAT’S the solution to the Memory of Disappointment mystery: maybe I tried a sample of eau de parfum, then bought the eau de toilette.

…Okay, I forced myself to persist, and I now have a THIRD bottle of Chantilly on its way to me, a Dana-not-New-Dana one. For heaven’s sake. If they all smell the same and/or I don’t even like the smell anymore, we will have to do a giveaway!

Let’s just keep distracting ourselves with chatty things.

Julia asked if we could have another stranded-mail check-in, and I’d like that too. I’ll go first. The package I sent to Paul’s sister on December 11th finally arrived several days after Christmas. Something I ordered for Henry on EBay arrived in the week after Christmas, too, and I could see from the postmark that it had been mailed December 8th. We got lots of Christmas cards after Christmas, many postmarked weeks earlier (the record was the one postmarked December 9th that arrived December 31st). I don’t THINK I had anything completely lost in the mail, but on the other hand I don’t keep very good track of such things, so I can imagine suddenly saying “Hey, whatever happened to…???” And of course I don’t know how many Christmas cards might have been lost.

Speaking of suddenly thinking of something, I suddenly realized I’ve been focusing so hard on January 20th, I wasn’t remembering Valentine’s Day. We don’t do MUCH for Valentine’s Day (I put dinner on heart-shaped plates, and I buy myself a box of chocolates because I have given up on making that happen any other way), but I do always buy the kids these giant Hershey Kisses, and a pandemic year is not the year to accidentally forget a tradition. I was able to order them for Drive-up, AND they were 50 cents less if bought that way, AND this week is 20% off all Valentine candy, so that was good timing.

(image from Target.com)

I wish there was a way to say “No reply needed” on letters to representatives/officials. Or rather, I know there is a way to say it, and it’s by saying it, but in my experience they don’t HEED such instructions. I needed to write an email recently to a bunch of people in charge of our school system, and now emails are coming back to me saying the things that they have to say when they get input from a parent, and I am wishing we could SKIP IT. One email said the things and ALSO promised to reply at more length later on, and PLEASE DO NOT. And last time I wrote a letter of this sort, someone CALLED ME to say the things they are required to say, and that was the WORST.

I don’t really know how to segue from New Year’s resolutions and book reviews to whatever I’m going to write about today, considering the gap between posts includes a violent attempted coup in the United States. How does one move right over THAT into a chatty post about how Paul cleaned the bathroom floor by using a Swiffer, half a roll of paper towels, and plain water? Or maybe a post about all the page-a-day calendars I considered for my desk when I needed SOMETHING to do other than doom-scrolling? Or I could tell you about how our credit card information somehow got stolen again, but I don’t think we want to think about how some people get up every morning and decide to do things they know are wrong.

Well. Nine days until Inauguration Day. Sure hope the highly-trained elite force guarding our nation’s capital NOW feels prepared to deal with any coup attempts, so we don’t have a repeat of “Whoops, we accidentally let them all in, and then accidentally let them all leave!” And perhaps we could straighten out ahead of time the little glitch we discovered where it turns out the president is in charge of the National Guard in D.C., and doesn’t have to bring them in to protect Congress and the VP if his own preference is for the coup to continue.

I wish to discuss a book. Normally I would say exactly what I wanted to say (within the realm of normal human consideration), on the principle that authors who want to be happy should not seek out strangers talking smack about their babies. However, in this case, I know that the author’s wife reads here, and she knows I know, and that gives me an extra responsibility to be careful with my words. My original intention, before reading the book, was to get around that issue by Just Not Talking About the Book Here—but it turns out the book reached near-obsession levels for me, and I want you to read it too. And yet I am not willing to strongly recommend a book by telling you ONLY the good things. So here we are. I am going to tell you what I liked and didn’t like about the book, while KNOWING the author’s wife is STANDING RIGHT THERE.

(image from Target.com)

The Revisionaries, by A. R. Moxon (Target) (Amazon)

I will begin by telling you how I went into this book, because expectations matter. I follow the author on Twitter; he’s funny and he does a lot of political tweeting I agree with. When he wrote a book, I put it on my wish list, even though I am not really reading books by men right now. When I got the book, I was surprised by what a giant book it was (600 pages, with narrower-than-usual margins), and found it intimidating; combined with the male-author issue, it drifted to the bottom of the To Read pile. Over Christmas break I decided to just TACKLE it and find out one way or the other if I liked it, so that if I DIDN’T like it I could add it to the Read-Once Book Giveaway I’m planning to do sometime this month or next.

It took me awhile to get into it. It’s the kind of book where a lot is happening that isn’t supposed to make sense yet, and that is not my usual style of book, and it kept starting NEW plotlines where it’s not supposed to make sense yet, so then you have to put a mental bookmark in one thing you don’t understand and start a new thing you don’t understand, and also there were some long visual descriptions which I tend to skim; and so I was slogging a bit, and kept realizing I’d been skimming over something important and would need to go back and re-read. But the writing was good, and the characters seemed promising, and the plot seemed compelling, and I liked it enough to keep reading but not enough to think I would necessarily finish it. At some point, though, it Caught. There were two days when I spent virtually all my free time reading it: I would get up stiffly out of my chair, thinking I ought to do something else for awhile, but soon I would be back in the chair reading it again. When I wasn’t reading it, I was thinking about it. Paul kept asking me nervously if I was upset about something, but I was NOT upset, I was VERY THINKING. I finished it yesterday, and my tentative plan is to just start reading it over again, because I don’t really want to read anything else; the ONLY reason I might not do this plan is that I think it’s the rare sort of book Paul might like TOO (our tastes overlap almost zero), and so I might want to have HIM read it instead. But maybe I’ll read it again and THEN let Paul read it.

Now I am going to say the things I didn’t like, things you might not like either—or, in two-and-a-half of the three cases, things that might make you MORE interested in reading it. The first is purely subjective: I don’t like it when a book leaves me guessing, or when a book leaves me feeling like I didn’t in the end understand everything that happened. Paul, on the other hand, LOVES that kind of book, and refers to the kind of book I like as “spoon-fed,” which makes me want to think of mean words to describe the kind of book HE likes. One of the reasons I want to re-read it is because it was the style of book where What Is Going On is only gradually revealed, so I want to go back to the beginning and see if my finished-book knowledge helps me better understand what happened. But if after a second reading, and further contemplation, I end up feeling like (1) I was too stupid to understand the book and/or (2) the author did not effectively communicate the plot so that it could be understood and/or (3) the author didn’t really know what happened, either, and covered that up by making it SEEM like the reader is just too stupid to understand (the second and third things are the kind of accusations I would make about some of the books Paul likes), I will like the book less overall.

The second thing I didn’t like is another subjective thing: I don’t generally like when books try to be clever, or when I feel as if the author is saying “DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE???” (Paul DOES like that kind of book). This book was 10-15% too clever for my usual tastes: a tolerable level, but a level worth bracing for if you feel the way I do about it. On the other hand, I will say there were at least two moments when something clever happened and I had to stare into space for a few minutes, fully appreciating the moment (YES I DID SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE), which gives me a little insight into why other people might like clever books. (For one thing, it makes them feel clever for catching the cleverness. But that is annoying to me, too: Paul already believes himself cleverer than I think he ought to, so it feels like the author of a Clever Book is feeding Paul’s ego while also feeding his own ((LOOK HOW CLEVER WE BOTH ARE!!)), and that the two of them ought to knock it off.)

The third thing I want to discuss is the female characters. Speaking of effective communication (end of the paragraph before last), I am not sure I can successfully achieve that here, and may need more time to think it over / re-read before I can even figure out what I want to say, but I will give it a shot. There are good, strong, well-developed female characters in this book, and some of the book is written from their perspective, and I found their perspective reasonable and even very good, and I did not think my usual thought that male authors should not try to write from a female point of view, and in fact I thought more highly of the author for these portrayals. And you will not have to read about their breasts, or their firm thighs, or their endless thoughts on shoes, or whatever. But all of them are Eves: they are there because an Adam needed a helpmeet or a confidante or a girlfriend/wife or a motivation or a conflict in his relationship with a male God. They are Delilahs: strong women who have strong roles, but they are characters in a man’s life story, not the other way around. This book is about a man who, and a man who, and the man who, and the man who; then the women are added in. It does just barely pass the Bechdel Test, but just barely. Even the women’s THOUGHTS are almost entirely about the men in their lives. On the other hand, as I said, a lot of their thoughts are GOOD: the women are in many cases smarter, better, more aware, and more self-aware than the men; they see the men’s flaws, and they see the story more clearly than the men do, and there is some feeling that the reason they are Eves/Delilahs is that THAT IS THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS FOR WOMEN RIGHT NOW, AND THAT IS WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO THEM BY MEN, AND THAT THE AUTHOR SEES THAT AND IS CONSCIOUSLY PORTRAYING AND SPECIFICALLY COMMENTING ON THAT VERY IDEA. And it’s clear he IS doing some of that (the female characters have some of those thoughts), but that’s not the whole thing: it still feels like a story where the men were put in first, and the women take the supporting roles. The supporting roles are VERY VERY VERY GOOD ROLES! We’re talking 99th percentile of good supporting roles! But they’re not the leads. The leads are Adam, and a male God, and Samson.

Anyway, none of that is stopping me from thinking about the book all the time, and wanting to start it over again at the beginning, and thinking you should read it too, EVEN THOUGH THE AUTHOR IS MALE. I thought it was remarkable. I have WOKEN UP HAPPY IN THE MORNINGS, THINKING OF HAVING THIS BOOK TO READ/RE-READ. I hope there are more books by this author, and I would pre-order any such books, and I only have maybe five or six authors total that I’d pre-order, and all the others are women, and two of them don’t write books anymore.

I will send one commenter a copy of the book (U.S. addresses only, but if you have friend/family in the U.S., you can have me ship it as a gift to them). To enter, leave any comment at all (if that kind of freedom freezes you with indecision, as it does me, you can comment with a recent book you liked, or some general/specific thing you like/dislike in books, or a treat you’re looking forward to eating later), and I’ll draw a name on…let’s see, today is Saturday, how about Monday? Mondays don’t have much else to recommend them. January 4th, “sometime during the day.”

Update: Choosing the winner. I use Random.org when I need a random number, and for contests I usually generate a little LIST of numbers: it’s typical to count through to find the 77th comment and find it’s from a commenter who doesn’t want to be entered, and then to go to go to the second pick, which is #58 and turns out to be my own reply to another comment, and so on. So what I do is, I generate, say, 5-10 numbers, and….okay, this is getting dull, I see that now. HERE IS MY POINT: My point is that as I was generating numbers and writing them down, I thought of the story of Jonah, which relates to this book and is not a spoiler, and how the people on the ship draw lots to see who God is mad at. And I don’t know precisely what drawing lots means in this story (I’m imagining straws, with one straw shorter), but I get the gist. Meanwhile I was still jotting my list, and I thought, “What would be neat is if the same number occurred multiple times in this random draw—AS IF I were looking for The Divine Answer to Who Should Get This Book, rather than looking for a random number.” And in my list of ten numbers, the same number appeared twice. And then this will sound like it is not true BUT IT IS: I drew an eleventh time, and got that same number a third time—as if it were saying “I SAID WHAT I SAID.” So it is commenter Angela of the 1:14 p.m. comment on January 2nd! I will email you, Angela!