My father’s reading list prior to 1936, continued

Androcles and the Lion—George Bernard Shaw

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch—Alice Hegan Rice

A Christmas Carol—Charles Dickens

Edith Trevor’s Secret—Mrs. Harriet Lewis

The King of Kings—Jeanie MacPherson and Henry MacMahon

The Black Pirate—MacBurney Gates

The Whistling Waddy--Donald Bayne Hobart

Deerslayer—James Fenimore Cooper

Riders of the Purple Sage—Zane Grey (author of the next four titles)

Desert Gold

Thunder Mountain

The Mysterious Rider

Man of the Forest

The Crossing—Winston Churchill

Marjorie Daw—Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The Black Hunter—James Oliver Curwood

Kazan—James Oliver Curwood

Bob, Son of Battle—Alfred Ollivant

Dick Kent, Fur Trader—Milton Richards

Tarzan of the Apes—Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of the next six titles)

Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar

Tarzan and the Golden Lion

Tarzan at the Earth’s Core

Tarzan and the Lost (World) Empire

Tarzan the Untamed

Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle 

Treasure Island—Robert Louis Stevenson

The Wonderful War (The Saint)—Leslie Charteris

The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter—Ambrose Bierce

The Shadow Man—Edgar Wallace (author of the next eleven titles)

Red Aces

The Colossus

The Terror Keep

The Devil Man

The Green Ribbon

The Mystery of the Frightened Lady

The Fellowship of the Frog

India-Rubber Men

The Fourth Plague

The Black

The Ringer

The Flying Beast—Walter S. Masterman

The Greek Coffin Mystery—Ellery Queen (author of the next two titles)

The Egyptian Cross Mystery

The Dutch Shoe Mystery

The Kennel Murder Case—S.S.Van Dine (author of the next three titles)

The Greene Murder Case

The Bishop Murder Case

The Scarab Murder Case

Laughing Death—Walter C. Brown

The Daughter of Fu Manchu—Sax Rohmer

Extroversion, introversion, and ambiversion

Apparently, it is now acceptable and even cool to be an introvert in the workplace, after many years of hearing about how important it was to be an extrovert in the workplace. Saturday’s NY Times ran an article about exactly this-- http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/fashion/susan-cain-instigating-a-quiet-revolution-of-introverts.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur. I guess it’s a good thing if introverts are finally being appreciated in the workplace. But I have to wonder why we cannot all just ‘live and let live’, generally in society and in the workplace specifically. I wrote a comment in the article’s Comments section; to wit—“It would be great if we were all allowed to be who we are--introvert, extrovert or somewhere in-between--and to contribute accordingly in the workplace. Why must everything become a trend? Extrovert last year, introvert this year. What's cool for next year? Why can't we accept that people are different? We cannot all be the same--God forbid. What a boring world that would be”.

I cannot understand why workplaces are so fickle and so insecure. Some people do not want to be social all the time, or spend all their time in meetings; they simply want some alone time to do the best job they can with the talents they are given. Do employers actually think that if all employees were pure extroverts, or pure introverts, that workplaces would be better places? These trends are the new flavors of the month, and I’m betting that most employees are sick of them. Employees have had extroversion pushed down their throats during the past decade, with no consideration for whether that particular personality trait was even helpful or good for them. I can attest to that; scientists have been pushed hard to sell themselves and their research, in ways that seem so foreign to the profession. It’s as though we were supposed to be salespeople selling a product. Frankly speaking, I’m not sure you can just switch from one to the other at whim if you are a true introvert or true extrovert. I happen to be one of those people who does not believe we can just toss off our old coat and put on a new one at the behest of our employers. One does not go from being an introvert today to being an extrovert tomorrow; it wouldn’t matter to me how many motivational, marketing or sales courses one attended. To some extent, we are the products of our genes, and to some extent, our environment can modify their expression. I’m not saying we can’t modify our behavior or personality traits, but I’m willing to bet that most people understand whether they are more introverted or extroverted from a young age, and choose their professions accordingly. I’d bet also that sales and marketing professions attract more extroverts, while research and laboratory professions attract more introverts. I’d need to see the statistics on this though, before I could come to a reasoned conclusion.

The workplace needs introverts (those people who are energized by being alone and whose energy is drained by being with other people--see http://giftedkids.about.com/od/glossary/g/introvert.htm), extroverts (those people who are energized by being together with other people--see http://giftedkids.about.com/od/glossary/g/extrovert.htm), and all those who define themselves as in-between (those who have the qualities of both). I fall into the latter category, which certainly seems to include the majority of people. After some searching online to find out what these people are called, the word ambivert popped up--someone who exhibits qualities of both introversion and extroversion. I am an ambivert—I enjoy (and need) my quiet alone time as a scientist, but also the social interactions at work. I enjoy (and need) my quiet alone time at home, but also the social interactions with family and friends. When it comes to social interactions, I prefer to have the element of choice—to choose how, when and where I will be social. I cannot be around people or talk to them every second of every day; I have no desire to be ‘on’ all day, every day. I need to be alone at times in order to recharge my batteries; and sometimes I need to be with others in order to do the same. It seems to balance itself out rather nicely for the most part.

Even with these definitions though, we need to stop ‘labeling’ people in the workplace (and in society too), and let employees contribute how best they can. It makes no sense to force a true introvert into an extrovert’s role, or vice versa. You will only create fearful, stressed and unhappy employees. I think the time has come to appreciate employees for their uniqueness and unique ability to contribute in the ways that make them feel comfortable. I’m not saying employees shouldn’t be challenged, but those challenges should have more to do with the framework of their work projects (e.g. giving them more responsibility within the confines of the project) and less to do with their personality traits.  

Thirty years ago today

Today, July 25^th, would have been my father’s 97^th birthday had he lived. He passed away thirty years ago, in March 1985. There is not a day goes by that I don’t think about him or my mother, who passed away in March 2001. I always remember my father’s birthday now, because my cousin Karen is born on the same day; when we were children, it was the opposite way around—I remembered her birthday when my dad’s birthday rolled around.

Thirty years. The passage of time. I remember my father and my mother in ways I never knew existed when I was younger, because I could not imagine them gone at that time. My father was 67 years old when he died; that’s young. They are both a part of me; I need only scratch the surface of my heart, mind and soul and they are there, waiting to talk to me.

My parents married on July 9^th, 1955, sixty years ago. Their thirtieth wedding anniversary was within reach when my father passed away. It seems like a short amount of time for them to be married when I look back now (my husband and are nearing twenty-five years married), but they had married later in life and became parents in their late thirties. I was remembering one of the things we children used to do for my parents when their wedding anniversary came around each year. We would buy a box of M&M candies, vanilla ice cream and cantaloupe, cut the cantaloupe in half, scoop out the seeds, and fill each half with ice cream and M&Ms. Our anniversary gift to them, at least for three or four years. The last thing my father probably needed was to eat ice cream full of saturated fats given his health problems, but he ate it because we made it for them. That was the kind of dad he was. As I peruse his reading list and write about it for my blog, I feel my father’s presence in my life. I welcome those memories and feelings.

My father’s reading list prior to 1936

As promised, I will continue to post the lists of books my father read during his life. He was a prolific reader already during his childhood and teenage years. In 1936, when he was eighteen years old, he started to annotate his reading list according to the specific year that he read a particular book. My post today will include some of the books he read prior to 1936. The first one on his list was Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz. Here are the first fifty books he recorded as read, so many of them typical of a young boy’s life…….

Quo Vadis—Henryk Sienkiewicz

Fortitude—Hugh Walpole

Robinson Crusoe—Daniel Defoe

Tom Brown’s Schooldays—Thomas Hughes

The Black Arrow—Robert Louis Stevenson

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—Mark Twain

Call of the Wild—Jack London

The Man without a Country—Edward Everett Hale

Men of Iron—Howard Pyle

Daddy Long Legs—Jean Webster

The Riflemen of the Ohio—Joseph A. Altsheler (also author of the next thirteen books)

The Young Trailers

The Forest Runners

The Free Rangers

The Scouts of the Valley

The Border Watch

The Sun of Saratoga

The Horsemen of the Plains

The Last of the Chiefs

Shadow of the North

Sun of Quebec

The Guns of Shiloh

The Tree of Appomattox

Apache Gold

The Arkansas Bear—Albert Bigelow Paine

Just So Stories—Rudyard Kipling

Story of a Bad Boy—Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Story of Roland—James Baldwin

Robin Hood and His Merry Men—John Finnemore

The Sky Pilot—Ralph Connor

Boy’s Life of Edison—William H. Meadowcraft

The Tragedy of the Italia—Davide Guidici

Uncle Tom’s Cabin—Harriet Beecher Stowe

Scouting with Daniel Boone—Everett T. Tomlinson

The Palm of the Hot Hand—King Phillips

Pinocchio—Carlo Collodi

Jim Davis—John Masefield

The Black Buccaneer—Stephen W. Meader

Boots and Saddles—E.B. Custer

The Perfect Tribute—M.R.S. Andrews

Twice Told Tales—Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Spy—James Fenimore Cooper

The Black Glove—Geraldine Gordon Salmon

The Gold Bug—Edgar Allan Poe

The Pit and the Pendulum—Edgar Allan Poe

The Other Wise Man—Henry Van Dyke

The Crisis—Winston Churchill

Richard Carvel—Winston Churchill

The Mansion—Henry Van Dyke

An abundance of cherries

There are two cherry trees and several plum trees in the inner courtyard of our co-op complex, as well as gooseberry, black currant and red currant bushes. The plum trees produced hundreds of plums last year, so this year they're taking a well-earned rest. The cherry trees however are loaded with fruit, so my husband has picked about five kilograms (eleven pounds) of cherries the past few days. What do you do with an abundance of cherries? Make cherry pies and preserves. I did both (and both turned out delicious). My husband will be making liquer as well. In a few weeks, I'll be making gooseberry, black currant and red currant jam when those berries are ripe. Last week, I made strawberry and strawberry/rhubarb jam. In past years I've made strawberry/rhubarb pie, and it too is delicious. It takes some time to make preserves and pies, mostly to prepare the fruit, but it's worth it. If you buy the right utensils, e.g. a cherry pitter (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B010S0E1W4?psc=1) and a plum pitter (http://tinyurl.com/nghowmr), you're off to a good start.

July 4th celebration in Frogner Park

The American Coordinating Council of Norway (ACCN, http://accn.no/#sthash.Ex6JoZol.dpbs) sponsors an American Independence Day celebration each year in Oslo’s Frogner Park. This year was the 30^th annual such celebration, and my husband and I were there to check it out on July 4^th. The celebration last for about five hours, enough time to enjoy the festivities, eat some food, listen to music, and check out the different exhibitions. We’ve been there once before, about fifteen years ago, together with my American friend Liza and her daughter Inger. At that time, we walked around, checking out the different exhibits and stands, but opted for grilling our own hotdogs and hamburgers rather than buying any food at the different food stands. This year, we bought some great burgers at one of the burger stands advertising chili burgers and Santa Fe burgers; they were excellent. There were long lines for most of the food stands—burgers, barbecued ribs, chili dogs, pancakes and the like. Ben & Jerry’s was there as well, as was The Nighthawk Diner (Oslo’s American-style diner that I wrote a post about back in June 2010). There were also two really good bands that played during the afternoon—Moving Day and Project BrundleFly. We also checked out the Classic American Cars exhibition; there were some incredibly beautiful classic cars that both my husband and I enjoyed looking at (Jean, check out the black Trans Am). I took a lot of photos and am including some of them here. A cheerleading exhibition by the Viqueens, as well as a watermelon eating contest, pony riding for the kids, and several raffles, were also on the agenda for the day. In other words, there was plenty to do, see and eat—something for everyone. I have to admit that when I first attended this celebration fifteen years ago, I had a different feeling about it then than I do now. At that time, I took my American heritage more for granted and was perhaps a bit blasé about it all. Now, there is a much more visceral response to what I value and love about being American, and I was very in tune with most of what was going on around me. I wonder if that has to do with my getting older (am I getting more nostalgic for all things American), or if I simply appreciate my country more, for all the little things that are part of my culture, that make life enjoyable and fun. Whatever the reason, I find that such experiences remind me of some of the enjoyable times in my childhood—when my family would attend the July 4^th fireworks celebration in Tarrytown. We would get to the Washington Irving junior high school bleachers early in the evening in order to get seats and listen to the band play all the patriotic marches until it got dark enough for the fireworks to begin. 

I really enjoyed being in Frogner Park this year; it was a gorgeous day in Oslo—sunny and warm—and it was just pleasant to sit on the grass, listening to music and watching the people mill about. The only thing I missed was fireworks, but that would be difficult to offer, since it would mean hanging around until 11pm or so (about the time it starts to get dark in Oslo during the summer months). Check out the photos below, and you’ll get an idea of what a lovely day it was and of how many people attended the celebration. And of course, how gorgeous some of the classic American cars really are. I fell in love with one of them—Chrysler’s The New Yorker. Is that so surprising?

Trans Am

Chrysler's The New Yorker

A new poem--Summer

Summer

Days of puffy clouds

Spread out upon a sunlit blue canvas

Cycling along a country road

Scent of cinnamon from the meadow plants

Along the roadside.

Days of happiness

Spent in summer’s sunshine

Carefree days and long nights

Birds calling to each other young and old

In the trees outside the window.

Days of green grass and leafy trees

A harmony of colors rich and light

The scent of roses and of lilacs

And honeysuckle that grows wild

Untended bushes of perfume.

Days of voluminous gray clouds

Portend the thunderstorms in wait

Misty rain upon the parched plants

Ominous the sound of distant thunder

That brings the cooling rain.

Never quite so happy as in summer

Days of green of peace of sun of light

Days of meaning from doing little more

Than contemplating nature

And the life around us. 

-----------------------------

copyright Paula M. De Angelis

July 2015

Live and let live, and mindfulness

I’ve been thinking about the ten tips for a happy life that I wrote about in my last post, and remembering back to a time when it was difficult to try to understand them enough to put them into practice. When I was younger, there were negative people in my life, who found it difficult to let others live their lives without constantly judging and criticizing them. Many of those people were seasoned adults when we were teenagers and young adults; I’m sure they had their reasons for being so critical and judgmental, but they were not the people you went to when you wanted inspiration or advice on how to be happy in life. My guess is that their own lives were unhappy, so they either did not know how to be nor could they show others how to be happy. They could not ‘live and let live’; the unhappiness in their own lives drove them crazy, I think. It rode them. Perhaps a bad marriage, a failed career, lack of money, lack of friends, emotional wounds that did not heal—there could be many reasons for the unhappiness. Some of them were intolerant individuals, particularly intolerant of the minority races they felt were taking over ‘white people’s USA’. These were the type of people who attended Sunday mass and then began to rag on the minority races the minute they came out of church. It did not make sense to me then, and it still doesn’t when people behave like that. I concluded that going to mass on Sunday does not a Christian make. I still feel that way.

It’s difficult to really practice the ten tips for a happy life unless you integrate them into your daily life. You have to understand them in order to put them into practice, and be conscious of your behavior and speech every single day. You have to be aware of what you do and say--think before you speak. Mindfulness is the key word. Wikipedia’s definition of mindfulness is ‘the intentional, accepting and non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment, which can be trained by meditational practices’. I wonder if the negative people in my past became mindful individuals who eventually found peace. I wonder if they were able to live with some sense of joy in the world together with others. I hope that for them in any case. I for one cannot imagine a more disquieting fate than being destined to leave this world as a diehard negative and intolerant person. 

Ten tips for a happy life from Pope Francis

I ran across these ten tips for a happy life recently, and they resonated with me. Wise words to live by. Interesting that they come from Pope Francis, who cautions against proselytizing (finally a religious person who sees the light) and who recommends not being negative and not hanging around with negative people. Smart man. Trying to convert others to your way of thinking, religious or not, is doomed to failure. I've hated that type of behavior my whole life. People are only driven away when they are constantly hit over the head and told to think like the person who is doing the pounding. I've always been suspicious of 'missionaries', on a mission to convert others to their way of thinking. And hanging around with negative people leads only to one thing, that you yourself become a negative person. Funny how that happens. Negative people are miserable people, and misery loves company. Negative people have an incredible amount of power over others. The problem is that by the time you understand that you are trapped in a spiral of negativity, you're in too deep. Negativity is like a whirlpool; it drags you under as you struggle to surface and not drown. You need a strong helping hand to pull you out of it--be that a positive person (like Pope Francis with his wise words), an inspiring book or film, or a crisis of some sort that makes you appreciate life again. And the idea of respecting and taking care of nature totally resonates with me--animals, birds, trees, rivers, you name it. It brings to mind St. Francis of Assisi, and for that I am grateful, because he loved animals and nature. I am aware, like many others, of just how important a message this is for our generation. Essentially, what runs through all of these tips, the common thread if you will, is a sense of peace, in oneself and in how one relates to the world.

1.       Live and let live

2.       Be giving of yourself to others

3.       Proceed calmly through life

4.       Have a healthy sense of leisure, making time to enjoy art, literature and to play with your children

5.       Sunday is family day and should be a holiday from work

6.       Find innovative ways to create dignified jobs for young people

7.       Respect and take care of nature

8.       Stop being negative and let go of negative things quickly

9.       Don't proselytize; respect others' beliefs

10.   Work for peace and be aware that peace is proactive and dynamic