Learning to be less concerned about what others think

Do men really prefer younger women rather than women their own age when looking for potential partners? This question came up at a recent couples' dinner party where the men sat talking together at one end of the table about cars, motorcycles and the stock market and the women sat at the other end talking about work, leadership, and eventually movies and television series. At one point one of the women brought up a recent survey that purportedly says that men really do prefer younger women rather than women their own age as partners; dating sites seemed to confirm this from their statistical data. Older women had a harder time finding a suitable partner on most dating sites because most of the men on the sites, even men their own age, preferred younger women. She thought that was very unfair to older women (namely women our age) and brought it up for discussion to the entire table of guests; the men wisely avoided the subject so the topic didn't get discussed much further. What should the men have said anyway? That it's not true? They cannot say that it's not true nor that it is true. Older men may be more interested in younger women than in older women on these dating sites, but no one really knows how the game plays out. Do the younger women actually go out with the older men? Or do they end up preferring men their own age?

What I found interesting is that any of the women sitting at that table would even care about this topic. All of them are in good relationships. All of them are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves financially if their husbands left them for younger women. They all make/made very good salaries and have good careers. Yes, it would be unfair, unkind, abominable, etc. if their husbands left them for younger women. We can all agree on that. My mother would have called them cads. But the women would survive. My major question is the following: why do women even care about what men think in this regard? Why do women need to see themselves in the eyes of men at all after many years of doing so? Because when you are younger you compete with other women for available men, you are looking for potential partners for marriage and children, you are looking for someone to perhaps take care of you financially, and so on. Competition is part of the picture when you are young. Much of this is built into who we are as human beings; the human race needs to continue and the instinct is to reproduce. That instinct leads to finding a partner with which to accomplish that. Men are looking for fertile women, and those women are usually young, under the age of fifty, because the childbearing years usually end around that time. Most young couples end up being together with partners their own age; some marry younger partners, some marry older. But the majority of young people marry within their own age group. So should older women be mad at evolution and the biology that renders women infertile after a certain point? Of course not. They shouldn't even be preoccupied with these thoughts after a certain point. Why should they? Why should they be at all preoccupied with what men or society at large think about them as older women? Trying to compete with younger women (or younger men in the case of older men) is just plain foolish. And if the older women I know, who are accomplished career women with no financial problems are concerned about this, then what about women who are less fortunate, financially or otherwise? 

My point is that older women should be less concerned about what men and society think of them and more concerned about enjoying their lives and their good fortune whether or not a man is in the picture. Nice if you have a good man with whom you can share your life, but what if there is no good man in the picture? Should you lay down and die? No. You should take your rightful place at the table of life; you've earned it. You should 'take up space', make your presence known, bring up your interests and hobbies, be yourself and live in harmony with yourself. Pursue your interests as far as they take you. If you have good health, be happy. Be happy in your own company. Take the trips you want to take by yourself. Do what you want to do. If you don't 'live' and merely wait around for a man to do these things with you, how long are you willing to wait? When will you do the things you want to do, when you are eighty years old? Forget about whether men will like you. Stop trying to mold yourself to please them. Don't define your worth in terms of whether you are together with a man or not. Why spend the last chapter of your life worrying about whether your husband would prefer being with a younger woman? If he leaves you for one, let him go, he wasn't worth hanging onto anyway. Look at your life as the adventure it really is, with its ups and downs and detours. It's your life, no one else's. I cannot imagine a worse fate than spending my entire life trying to mold myself to fit any man's preferences, rather than having lived my life being true to myself. 

 

'Get busy living or get busy dying'

'Get busy living or get busy dying'. One of the most memorable lines from one of my favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption, which I watched again the other night for about the fifth time. The quote is actually from the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, on which the movie is based. 

Andy says this to Red right after Andy has spent more than a month 'in the hole' (solitary confinement) for trying to get the warden to arrange for a new trial for him after new evidence turns up that he is actually innocent of murdering his wife and her lover. But the warden won't hear of it and goes about destroying all possibilities for this. The warden has his reasons, none of them ethical or good. It is his refusal to help Andy that pushes Andy to make the choice to escape prison, but not without bringing down the warden along the way. Get busy living is another way of saying 'focus on the positive', on what you can positively do about a difficult situation. It's about having hope, because hope is what man needs to keep him going and to keep him alive. Without hope, man can just lay down and die. As Andy says in the film 'Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies'. And that is Andy's point. You either have hope and move toward the positive, or you don't and then you move toward the negative. You give up all hope and get busy dying. Get busy living is also about adjusting to the curve balls that life throws at you. You have to be proactive, to take the reins of your own life, to change and to grow in order to deal with the tough times. You have to have hope that you'll come through them. 

The Shawshank Redemption is a remarkable film. I can't imagine two better actors playing the parts of Andy and Red than Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman respectively. The bond of friendship that develops between them is beautiful to see. Andy was a generous soul, whose prison term allowed him to develop into a man who truly cared about others. He managed to maintain his humanity in the morass of inhumanity that prison often is. He offered hope to his fellow prisoners without pushing it on them; he just lived according to his principles and that had an effect on those around him, especially Red. 

If you've never seen the film, I recommend it highly. It's violent and tough to watch in places. It doesn't present a rosy view of prison or of Andy's experiences in prison. The beauty of the film is in watching Andy slowly decide what he wants and how he wants to live out the rest of his life, and it's not in prison. He makes his decision without hurting his fellow prisoners, whom he has often helped. He offers Red the chance to join him, leaving the decision up to Red, after they've discussed how they want to live the rest of their lives. Andy never tells Red about his escape plans, thus protecting Red from possible repercussions. But he provides the means (money) for Red to eventually join him and he makes Red promise that he will try to find the place in Maine where Andy has buried something for him. He never tells Red what he's buried, which piques Red's curiosity and gives him the motivation to survive life outside of prison. We need more films like this in the world--films about hope, friendship, generosity (fiscal as well as spiritual), integrity, and goodness. 

Revisiting 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People'

I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey during the 1990s (it was first published in 1989) and recently reread it. I enjoyed rereading it, now that I have the perspective of someone who was in the workforce for over forty years and just recently retired. He imparted his wisdom as a leader and a teacher, much of it practical, but he also emphasized the necessity of reflection in order to help us make the choices we need to make. His book is really a primer for how one should live one's life, even though the book is often utilized as a primer for how to be more effective in the workplace. 

The seven habits are as follows:

1. Be proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first 
4. Think win-win
5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood
6. Synergize
7. Sharpen the saw

I'm not going to give detailed analyses or summaries of each habit, as I encourage you to read the book and reflect upon his advice. I agree with much of what he writes. It is important to be proactive, not reactive in most situations where there is an actual choice, and it is beneficial to try to understand the other party first before wanting to be understood. Those two habits alone will help you in the workplace but also in most interpersonal relationships. I would add that it is important to try to understand oneself as well because that will also contribute to better relationships with others. 

Many people don't understand what proactive means. I've written before in this blog about being proactive. Proactive is a conscious choice to act instead of react. It is a choice for rather than against positive change. It could mean facing a difficult situation and taking the reins oneself in order to try to solve it instead of passively waiting for someone to come along and solve it for us. Often we wait for the latter because then we have someone to blame if the situation doesn't work out. We may not consciously want to blame others, but it's the easy way out, so we 'choose' it. You'd be surprised at how many people play the blame game; whether they need to play it or like to play it is inconsequential. The point is that playing the blame game is reactive behavior. But sometimes the division between proactive and reactive is not so clear. There are situations in life (personal and work) where you have tried everything and nothing works to solve a specific problem. Inertia rules the day. You've tried being proactive and reactive. So you let go and move on because taking care of yourself becomes the priority. 

I would have liked to have met Stephen Covey and discussed some aspects of work life with him. I would have asked him for his reflections about specific situations, e.g. when you have bent over backward trying to understand frustrating and incompetent workplace leaders, when you have been proactive and positive and tried to help them and give them what they say they want, but there is no response. You meet a wall of no response no matter what you do. After a period of time where you give them the benefit of the doubt, you let go and move on. Because that is best for your health--physical and psychological. 

The main misconception that most advice-givers and motivational teachers have is that workplace leaders are very invested in their employees' career advancement and overall job satisfaction. But sometimes they are not. Sometimes all they want around them are yes-people who make no waves and who demand nothing. Some leaders just want to be left alone so that they don't have to deal with those they view as bothersome employees. Covey doesn't really address such situations in his book. In other words, most of the situations he presents are win-win for both parties--the success stories. That's great but it's not always real life because both sides have to think win-win, and it's not all the time that both sides do. 

I'm glad I reread his book, because I realized that I've figured out a lot for myself by myself over the years, even though I have on occasion sought advice in such books. I mostly didn't rely on others to solve my workplace issues and I came through them a changed person--stronger and more capable of dealing with bullshit-dispensing leaders or leaders who simply didn't care about their employees. The latter exist, make no mistake about that, and those are the leaders with whom I've had to deal sometimes. The problem with people who believe that there is a solution to all problems is that they believe their own hype. I believe in trying to find solutions to problems, yes, but I also believe in letting go and moving on when it no longer makes sense to hang around. That may not be viewed as a positive solution by those who want to solve all conflicts in a positive manner, but sometimes leaving forces change in the people who need to change, including the person who leaves. 

Updating our smartphones--I can definitely relate

Yesterday's Pearls Before Swine. Haha, I can definitely relate, as I'm sure many people can. I delay updating my phone and my laptop for as long as possible, especially my phone, for the reason Pig mentions. I had an iPhone 6 up until April 2020 and would have kept it except for all the updates that I reluctantly installed that slowed it down until it was almost unusable. I bought an iPhone SE 2020 because it resembles my old iPhone 6, which I loved. I dislike intensely the incessant push to get us to buy new smartphones every year or every other year. Why do we need to? What is so revolutionary about the new ones that we need to trade up every year? I won't do it; I'm not interested in being a sheep that just does what she's told to do by corporations, advertising and social media. Find another patsy. 

'Maybe You'll Be There' sung by Diana Krall

Back in mid-September 2001 Diana Krall released her album The Look of Love, a collection of jazz, bossa nova and traditional pop songs that was hugely popular. It contains songs by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, Victor Young and Edward Heyman, Arthur Hamilton, Hoagy Carmichael and Jane Brown Thompson, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and Rube Bloom and Sammy Gallop. It quickly became one of my favorite albums. We were lucky to get a chance to see Diana Krall in concert at the annual jazz festival in the town of Kongsberg in 2003; it had to be one of the most popular concerts in their history.  

I was listening to her album tonight while I was making dinner, and it brought back memories as it always does when I listen to it--some sad and some happy. I bought the album the same year my mother died, so it always reminds me of her. It also reminds me of my own walks after dark (but not after midnight) during the autumn months of 2001. I had been sick for several months that year after my mother died in March, and when I finally got well all I wanted was to be outdoors and to walk. Each night I walked around one of the nearby parks and listened to this album, a memory I find oddly comforting. I think my mother would have liked Diana Krall's versions of many of the songs on this album because they were songs she grew up with. I can almost feel her presence as I listen to them. I have my favorites; one of them is Maybe You'll Be There by Rube Bloom and Sammy Gallop. The lyrics are really poetry, and the song itself is beautiful and melancholy. Enjoy Diana Krall's rendition of this beautiful song and the lyrics. 

Maybe You'll Be There

Each time I see a crowd of people
Just like a fool I stop and stare
It's really not the proper thing to do
But maybe you'll be there

I go out walking after midnight
Along the lonely thoroughfare
It's not the time or place
To look for you
But maybe you'll be there

You said your arms would always hold me
You said you lips were mine alone to kiss
Now after all those things you told me
How can it end like this

Someday if all my prayers are answered
I'll hear a footstep on the stair
With anxious heart
I'll hurry to the door
And maybe you'll
Be there

Songwriters: Bloom Rube / Gallop Sammy

Maybe You'll Be There lyrics © Wb Music Corp., Sammy Gallop Music Company

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Tarrytown in September

When I was visiting Tarrytown in September, I took some photos of the Hudson River, the lighthouse, and the new Tappan Zee Bridge. It was early evening when a good friend and I decided to have dinner at the boat club. It was a beautiful clear evening with perfect weather, just right for taking some photos. Whenever I look at these photos I am reminded of how beautiful my hometown really is. We were fortunate to have grown up there. Enjoy.....

In honor of Veteran's Day

We learned to recite this poem in grammar school in honor of Veteran's Day. The first two lines of the poem have remained in my mind even though the rest of the poem has not. The poppy is a symbol of remembrance and hope according to what I have read online. I can remember being given a red paper poppy to pin to my school uniform on Veteran's Day. I always wondered what it symbolized and now I know. We are acknowledging that we remember and support all the armed forces in the world, and that we hope for a peaceful future. 

Poppies grow in my garden; the flowers are lovely but fragile. I'm not sure what type of poppies they are, just that they're red. When the wind blows through the garden it scatters the red petals that are torn off the flowers by the wind. But poppy seeds spread well in a garden and a gardener can end up with a small field of red poppies blowing in the wind. 

In Flanders Fields

BY JOHN MCCRAE

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

 Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

 In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Pushing back against the hype

I have always had a deep mistrust of anything that is hyped, be it a book, a movie, a song or a lifestyle trend. It doesn’t matter what; whenever ‘experts’ use their pulpits to push ad nauseam this or that wonderful book/film/song/lifestyle trend, my hackles go up. I don’t mind reading what professional reviewers of books, movies, and music have to say, but frankly, as I’ve gotten older, I no longer really trust what they have to say. They have a lot invested in keeping the status quo going, and that means promoting the same modern authors, movie directors, and musicians over and over.

Take books alone. Whenever I read about the new ‘hot’ book being pushed by professional reviewers for the mainstream media (often in top-notch publications), I find it on Amazon and read the ‘verified purchase’ reviews submitted by ordinary readers, not those of the publishing houses, media houses, established reviewers or journalists invested in keeping the status quo going. I read the 5-star reviews and the 1- and 2-star reviews. Many people dismiss the latter as the rantings of disgruntled or envious individuals, and while that may be the case sometimes, in my experience it is not the case most of the time. In the same way that not all the 5-star reviews are believable; you get the feeling that this is too good to be true. The 1- and 2-star reviewers are surprisingly honest when they write ‘I couldn’t get into this novel no matter how hard I tried’, or ‘I got to the halfway point and couldn’t get any further’, or ‘I’ve read other books by this writer that are very good, but this one missed the mark’. And so on. I read those reviews because that’s often how I feel when I am reading a book that was pushed on me by the media or by literary pundits. I think to myself, I am going to write a review of this book that I don’t like, even if most readers did like it. And sometimes I do. I mostly post them on Goodreads, but sometimes on Amazon as well. Nowadays it’s difficult to push back against the hype, but sometimes you have to, and I say that as a writer that has gotten reviews that both like and don’t like what I’ve written. As long as the less-than-stellar reviews are not rude or unprofessional, I accept them as being part and parcel of being a writer. You can’t win them all, but of course you hope for stellar reviews. But accepting the negative ones about my own work means that I am also free to write about what I dislike when it concerns others' work. I am free to be negative about a book/movie/song as long as I remain polite and professional about it.

I can’t tell you how many Kindle books I’ve downloaded to my iPad to read over the past decade or so. I persist with some books that I simply cannot abide, merely to finish them so that I can have an opinion if the book comes up in conversation with someone. But I have given up on two or three books in my lifetime; I found them either so boring as to put me to sleep or so chaotic and unintelligible that I simply didn’t want to waste my time trying to sort out the plot or the lack of one. I lost interest, plain and simple.

I am currently reading Joan Didion’s works, and have gotten through Play It As It Lays (fiction) and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (essays). I’m halfway through another collection of essays The White Album. I have not prioritized reading her books earlier. Joan Didion is considered to be one of America’s great writers, an icon as it were. She spent years as a journalist documenting an era in American life (the 1960s and 1970s) where everything seemed topsy-turvy, where conservative values were tossed out the window, albeit by a minority of the population, in favor of free love and a hippie lifestyle. She writes about the hippie lifestyle in California at that time, as well as the privileged life in Hollywood where anyone who was ‘anyone’ hobnobbed with actors, actresses, celebrities, movie directors, agents, and wanna-bes. Her writing is permeated by a sense of anxiety about the meaninglessness of life. She and her husband wrote screenplays for major movies and were quite successful at it. It all sounds glamorous but it isn’t and wasn’t; she makes sure that you know that. She managed to remain outside of all of the nonsense and hype for the most part, documenting it as the keen observer she was during those years. She’s a very good writer, I'll grant that, but what she writes about holds very little appeal for me. I’ve never really wondered about or been interested in most of the lives or topics she documents and I’m not sure what that says about me. I grew up in the era she writes about, but in New York and not California. I remember a lot of unrest and political turmoil from that time, but her presentation of California creates a feeling of hopelessness. It seems to be a wasteland of sorts. I did not like Play It As It Lays because of those feelings of hopelessness and nihilism. What was the real point of the book? It portrays a wasted life in a wasteland filled with wasted people who are wasting their lives, living in a bubble where they think they are so important. We all know they are not. Perhaps that is her point, to show that these people are lost. If so, she succeeds, but I don’t find anything really uplifting in her writing. It could be due to her desire to remain detached, I’m not sure. Her writing comes across as rather flat emotionally, indicative of a depressive state of mind. Adam Kirsch wrote in The New York Sun in 2006 that “She always seems to be writing on the brink of a catastrophe so awful that her only available response is to withdraw into a kind of autism.” That is a very good description of her writing, in my opinion. For all the chronicling of her life and the lives of others, she remains an enigma and that is rather strange considering that she often writes about herself and her life. Perhaps that is not enough to discover who you really are. As a writer, you can hide behind your descriptions of yourself, especially if you don't want to be known. Perhaps the best explanation for why she is who she is can be found in her essay On the Morning After the Sixties in the collection of essays The White Album. She writes 

"We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate. To have assumed that particular fate so early was the peculiarity of my generation. I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults. That most of us have found adulthood just as morally ambiguous as we expected it to be falls perhaps into the category of prophecies self-fulfilled: I am simply not sure. I am telling you only how it was. The mood of Berkeley in those years was one of mild but chronic “depression...Only one person I knew at Berkeley later discovered an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time. A few of the people I knew at Berkeley killed themselves not long after."

The problem for me is that it's hard to tell if this mood describes many people at Berkeley during that era in American life or just a few. When you are depressed you have a tendency to 'see' that in the world around you. She is honest in saying that perhaps she doesn’t really know what she thinks or feels about a particular situation. Perhaps she says it best when she describes herself as a writer but not an intellectual, not a thinker. When I googled the definition of an intellectual, I found that she is literally correct. The formal definition of an intellectual is ‘a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for the normative problems of society, and thus gains authority as a public intellectual’ (Wikipedia). Didion observes and writes about what she sees in society in a coolly detached way, but she does not reflect very much upon her observations, which is what an intellectual might have done. She is an observer and a reporter. I miss the reflections and critical thinking. But that’s me. She is an example of a writer that has been praised to the hilt but one that I cannot really relate to no matter how hard I’ve tried, and I've read two essay collections and one novel by her. I find myself just wanting to be finished with the essays in The White Album. I know that their essences will not stay with me because they have had very little impact on me. 

Other authors who have been hyped in recent years and whose books I really did not like/did nothing for me are Sally Rooney (Normal People), Camille Pagán (I’m Fine and Neither Are You), Andre Aciman (Call Me by Your Name), Dana Spiotta (Innocents and Others), Anna Burns (Milkman), Michael Crichton (Prey), Teresa Driscoll (I Am Watching You), Camilla Läckberg (Gullburet—The Golden Cage), Charles Lambert (The Children’s Home), Matt Marinovich (The Winter Girl), Ian McEwan (Machines Like Me), Stephenie Meyer (Twilight #1), Sayaka Murata (Convenience Store Woman), and Scott Sigler (Infected #1), among others. These are modern novelists, but I am not a huge fan either of some of the ‘classic’ writers who were pushed on us as teenagers and young adults. I think of J.D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), Herman Melville (Moby Dick), Philip Roth (any of his books), and others. We had to reflect on the symbolism in some of these books and write about it for class; these books did nothing for me and I found analyses of them tedious.

You can agree with me or not; it’s fine. That’s what makes the world an interesting place—the heterogeneity of individual opinions. You can say that I have eclectic taste, and you might be right. You can say that I’m opinionated at times, and that would be true. But I’m not going to follow the crowds running headlong to overpraise overhyped writers. A number of the modern writers I’ve listed in the previous paragraph are mediocre in my opinion. But they enjoy a huge following and they sell a lot of books. There’s no accounting for taste. But I do know what I like and don’t like. Writing about what I don’t like helps me push back against the hype. It’s becoming more necessary for each day that passes.

 

The need to breathe--dealing with psychological suffocation

What happens to us when we are constantly bombarded by a barrage of outrage fomented by news and social media, or nitpicking courtesy of the news pundits and social media, or constant noise, or people/events that clamor for our constant attention? My friend Jean came up with the term 'psychological suffocation' to aptly describe how we can feel when faced with all of this--smothered, unable to breathe. Psychological suffocation--when the heart and mind can't breathe--can affect us physiologically. Both she and I agree that modern society as we know it is too focused on fomenting outrage and division instead of peace and harmony, too 'in your face', too noisy, and too 'on' all the time. Even if all these things are not intentionally designed to suffocate us psychologically, they have that effect far too often. As she says, the feeling of psychological suffocation makes her want to throw open the windows and the door to breathe in the air, the peace, the quiet of nature outside her door. When I reach that point, all I want to do is go to my garden or for a long walk or bike ride. Just to get away from it all--from the influences that get the heart pounding in anger and outrage and that make it difficult to breathe. 

The ultimate solution to dealing with the things that psychologically suffocate us is to prevent them from having that power over us. That means keeping them at bay--shutting out the news or walking away from people and situations that want us to be continually outraged. It means being selective about what we let into our minds and hearts. Garbage in, garbage out, as the old saying goes. It's like junk food; if all we eat is junk food, then our bodies will not be healthy. Likewise our minds; they will not be healthy if all we feed them is outrage, aggression, anger, and more outrage. We are constantly being told how to think and how to feel. I'm surprised that doesn't bother more people. 

Both the regular media and social media are invested in riling us up with what I call fake outrage because that's how they drag in viewers. More viewers, better ratings, more money. It's all about the money. If they were really interested in solving the problems in society, they would come up with solutions to problems, even if those solutions were on a small scale. Because I ask you, what is the point of getting riled up if we don't come up with a solution, however small, to deal with whatever problem is brought up? If we do nothing about the problem that we are told to be outraged about, then the outrage is pointless and by extension, false. Additionally, false outrage is demotivating and leads to feelings of hopelessness and despair. As Christians, we are called to act as well as to have faith and to pray. An old Chinese proverb that was adopted by the Christian inspirational group The Christophers as their motto says 'it is better to light one candle than curse the darkness'. I understood this already in my twenties when I discovered The Christophers. If you wait for the big solutions to occur to solve any problem whatsoever, you'll wait a long time. Better to start small. As Mother Teresa said, we can start by loving and showing charity in our own homes and families, before we worry about the rest of the world. She understood that if we managed to do this in our own homes, we would find it less difficult to extend love and charity to strangers. Additionally, if more people did this in their own homes, a number of family problems might actually be solved. Her focus was on starting where we find ourselves on a daily basis--home or work for most people. This makes sense because most of us will never live a life like Mother Teresa's. But she is an inspiration for us when we feel psychologically suffocated, when hope feels like it has disappeared, when outrage and despair take center stage. 

Hope. Hope counteracts psychological suffocation. Hope is found in nature, which exists outside of us and carries on despite what goes on in the world. There is the promise of hope in each new season. Prayer also counteracts it, regardless of how we define prayer or of how we pray. Prayer centers us and leads us to a quiet place, far away from the talking heads in the television studios and their obsession with outrage that borders on monomania. Hope and prayer give us the energy to deal with the problems around us. Continual outrage does not; it may seem like it would, but in the final analysis the energy we expend on continual outrage does nothing but exhaust us, leaving very little positive energy with which to work on the problems in the world. 

My laugh for today

 

Walking along the Akerselva River on a beautiful autumn day

My daily walk today was along the Akerselva River, walking on the path that parallels the river. I try to vary the trips; sometimes I'll walk to St. Hanshaugen Park, sometimes up along the river, or sometimes just around the neighborhood. When spring comes I'll do some biking as well and try some of the new routes along the Oslo fjord. I try to walk one to two miles per day; it varies depending on the route and on how energetic I am. Today was another beautiful autumn day in Oslo, so I took some photos as I walked. The color contrasts are lovely. It will start to rain as of tomorrow and will continue to rain steadily for at least a week. By then we're into November and the temperatures will be chillier. I've pretty much finished prepping the garden for winter, so when I visit the garden now it's nice just to sit there and enjoy the warm sun on my face. I'll miss it during the winter months. But when days are like today, all's right with the world. These beautiful days are gifts from God. 

A good laugh for the day

An old Peanuts comic strip, I'm not sure from which year, but it made me laugh. It's amazing when you consider that this strip ran from 1950 until 2000 (Schulz's death) and has continued in reruns ever since. We grew up with this comic strip and I still receive the reruns daily in an email from GoComics.com that lets me choose which comic strips I want to get. Thank God for the comic strips, they add that little extra to life! Enjoy.......

The phoenix rises from the ashes

Two months of freedom. It's been nearly two months since I retired. I don't miss the daily grind and I don't miss my former workplace. I miss some of the people I worked with, but that's about it. 

I was out with three former colleagues and friends last night to celebrate my retirement. We ended up at a very nice Italian restaurant called Olivia--very good food and a very pleasant atmosphere. We talked for almost three hours straight, mostly about my former workplace, since they've all worked there over the years. None of them miss it. Strange how that is. We all have different reasons for not missing it, but most of them come down to the arrogance of some of the male leaders (and one female leader) in our department, many of whom thought they were far brighter than they are, as well as the built-in egoism and arrogance of academia. The problem is that you are never good enough except when you drag in a lot of research funding. Then you are worth something. Money talks. It always has and always will. And who you know trumps what you know, every time. George Orwell's quote always comes to mind when I think about some of these 'great' research leaders "All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others". That about sums up the research experience in my former department. The bullshit that we got fed constantly was that if we wrote good grants and competed with these 'great' scientists, that we too would have a chance to get funding. The reality was that the same (large) research groups and the same researchers got funding every year, and every year one or two more 'small' scientists were squeezed out and deemed unproductive and lazy because they weren't getting funding. The lie we were asked to believe was that there was the real possibility of fair competition based on good ideas and expertise. The reality as I and many others see it was that much of the actual granting of funds was decided beforehand, based on who these researchers knew. As in, calls were made to the relevant political networks and contacts, who always take care of their own. Academia is often defined by cronyism--the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications (from the online dictionary). A very disagreeable business at times, with the emphasis on business, because in the end, it always comes down to money. Who would miss this crap or the continual scorn heaped upon those scientists who didn't want to (or couldn't) do science the way the big guys did it? Scorn is something many of them are very good at publicly dishing out, so that everyone in their vicinity knows that they're the important guys and the rest are just the stupid underdogs who should serve them. I understand that scientists need to bring in funds to do their research, but there should still be room for small scientists who never wanted to be leaders of huge research centers, who were content with a small research group and with just enough funding to get by each year. What was wrong with that way of doing science? Not everyone has sky-high ambitions; some simply want to do good research the way it was done in the 1990s and early 2000s, before politicians got involved and started demanding results for the money that was appropriated. Politics and science are not a good mix. And lest anyone think that more money equals better science, that is not necessarily true. There is a lot of good science that has resulted from limited funding. Politicians should remember that.  

My self-confidence is slowly returning. The past ten years in academia have been akin to being in a bad marriage where one gets harassed for the least little thing, where there is no kindness, no empathy, no understanding, just unreasonable demands, abuse, distress and unhappiness. My friend's father used to say 'don't let the turkeys get you down'. I tried not to let them get me down every day for the past ten years. I spent much of my time trying to build up the self-confidence of students who were treated rudely by their arrogant mentors in those 'great' research groups; I consoled tearful PhD students and postdocs who were members of those research groups. That took the focus off myself, so that I had little time to deal with my own problems. But my own self-confidence suffered, no doubt about that. I remember wanting to shift jobs back in 2010 and struggling to find something cohesive and positive to say about myself and my expertise. But I am proud of the fact that I never let myself be defeated by those leaders for whom I had NO respect. That has never happened in the past and will never happen as long as I remember to put my soul first. The health of my soul trumps any attempt to destroy my self confidence, my faith, my positivity, my kindness, my empathy. The health of my soul is all that matters. The rest of it--the bullshit--can just fall away. I don't view retirement as an end to anything other than an end to ten years of bullshit. That bullshit has been placed on a huge bonfire and has been reduced to nothing but ashes. The purveyors of the bullshit are another story; I'm guessing that karma will take care of them. One can only hope. And one can hope for a return to a time when what you knew trumped who you know. But I doubt that will happen in my lifetime. 

The phoenix rises from the ashes of the past. We rise from the ashes of our past selves. We are renewed. We are new people. We emerge from the shadows, we are no longer held under the thumbs of those who do not wish us well. We are free, free to fly. That is a good feeling. No amount of money can trump freedom--the freedom to decide for ourselves how we want to live the rest of our lives. 

A beautiful autumn day in Oslo

This past Saturday was a beautiful autumn day in Oslo, and I spent a couple of hours just wandering around the city as I often do on nice days. I walked to and through St. Hanshaugen Park and then made my way down Ullevålsveien and walked through Vår Frelsers Gravlund (Our Savior's cemetery), out onto Akersveien and down Telthusbakken where I crossed Uelandsgate and walked along the Akerselva River on my way home.

We have had a very rainy fall so far, so it was good to experience a few sunny days this past week. Today we're back to rain and the rest of the week will be rainy on and off. So when the nice weather comes it's just to make the most of it. 

A very good Italian deli in the vicinity of St. Hanshaugen Park

in the park itself

Vår Frelsers Gravlund (cemetery)

Gamle Aker church at the top of Telthusbakken

The Akerselva River 

The waterfall at Honsa Lovisas house

Dealing with honey fungus in the garden

Cultivating a garden each year is like taking a botany course with updates. Each year you learn something new. Every time you think that you've 'learned' what it takes to make plants happy, you find out (often the hard way) that you haven't. Sometimes you find out too that even if you've done everything in your power to keep your plants healthy and happy, it's not enough. There is evil lurking in the garden too, in the form of destructive pathogens that are just waiting to pounce when the time is right. I am learning that now. A pathogen called honey fungus has shown up in my garden, and has infected two plants--a blackberry bush and a rose bush. It's an insidious little underground creeper, as it sends out reddish-brown to black rhizomorphs that look like “bootlaces”. It spreads underground (up to three feet per year) infecting the root systems of susceptible trees and eventually killing them. It can also spread via spores. There is no chemical that can kill this fungus, and at present it is the most destructive fungal disease in gardens in the United Kingdom, according to my online research. 

One way to deal with this fungus is to completely dig out the stumps and roots of the infected tree(s). These should be removed from the infected area and destroyed. I have already done this with the blackberry bush, and will do the same with the rose bush come spring. They were very close to each other, no more than a couple of feet apart. I plan on letting the area where the infected trees have been, lie fallow for a year as well as on turning the soil in order to get rid of any rhizomorphs that may turn up. I had hoped to plant a new tree in this area, but this will have to wait a few years. I will have to move the birdbath to another area of the garden, since emptying the birdbath each day kept part of the area wet. But apparently plants get stressed by warm dry summers, and this makes them susceptible to attack. This past summer was warm and dry, at least in July and August. But June was rainy, as was September--very rainy. I would have thought that fungal infections would thrive in moist areas. Perhaps they do, after the plants have been weakened by too much warmth and dryness. 

There are many good garden sites online, the majority of them in the United Kingdom and the USA. I'm glad they exist, because you can get the advice and help you need very quickly. That helps me make the decisions I need to make. Some decisions need to be made immediately, like the decision to remove the blackberry bush and to cut down the rose bush to a stump. I'm hoping to stem the spread by doing this, because once winter comes, the fungus will die. But if it has spread widely underground, it will be a problem again come spring.