Los Angeles

I visited LA for two days in August to visit my sister and a friend from my year in Italy.

I did not take one photo. I can report the air was better in LA than it was in Seattle. My sister and I ate really good Peruvian food.  I went on an 8 mile urban hike as I walked from my sister's neighborhood to my friend's. I listened to the Wilderness podcast. Great fun.

Bellingham

I went to Bellingham for a couple of days last month with mom friends. Our kids have never hung out and are completely different so we have to hang out on our own. We've started a monthly get together so we can have parent friends during middle school. We are all isolated for our own reasons, and we have fun together.

Bellingham is really beautiful. We walked along a lovely downtown board walk and had lunch at a brewery I've been to many times but can't remember the name.. I am such a good travel writer.  Other than that, we just hung around and went from restaurant to bar to theater to walking trails. Lots of fun.

Lost Connections

My brother recommended this book to me. It was recommended to him by some intrusive software that had figured out he was going through a hard time.  The book is about the recent history of depression and anxiety and the current theories about their treatment.

The writer is someone who had suffered from depression since adolescence. He is from Britain but they have many of the same problems we do and they treat depression in the same way: they medicate it without asking any other questions about the person's life.

The author documents lots of really good reasons an average person in the US or Europe would be depressed or anxious ( they are treated as the same thing in the book -- their treatments by the medical community are the same):  lack of community and social and family ties, lack of autonomy from monotonous low paid and/or high stress work, empty values such as materialism that simply lead to emptiness.

I remember years ago when a friend called me to say she was considering taking medication for depression. I said, of course you are depressed. We live in a culture that hates women.  Who is happy here? Only people swimming upstream and that is exhausting.

In the years since I had to learn this lesson for myself.. so much easier said that done. To be content in our culture is an act of defiance against the rules of the society and the force and influence of our human condition. I've had to redefine the rules by which I live to avoid the fate of so many. It is a lot of swimming upstream but it's very worth it. Plus, as the author points out, the medication doesn't work for long.

Good book.

Three Identical Strangers

It is very rare that I see a movie in the theater.. or even at home. For my birthday, I watched The Spy Who Dumped Me because Kate McKinnon is in it, so is the guy from Outlander, and it's directed by a woman.  It was fine.. too violent for me. After seeing the movie, I vowed only to go to independent theaters where they don't assault a viewer with trailers for shitty movies for half an hour before the actual movie is shown. I digress.

A friend invited me to the documentary Three Identical Strangers. As promised, we went to an independent theater where I was not assaulted by shitty trailers. Good start.

This movie is not what I expected. It was so chilling, and thought-provoking, definitely not a feel-good show even though it starts out really happy. I cannot stand violent movies but I do not mind movies that are sad or like this one, disturbing, especially if they make you think.

I won't reveal the twist but the movie has lots of themes including which has more power: nature or nuture. A friend of mine once said that she didn't think you could change a child for the better ( however you define better ). Encouraging them to practice violin more or work harder on math usually has no outcome on the child's adult life other than hating music or math or the parent who pushed it. Ask Andre Agassi how he feels about tennis and/or his dad.

However, she said, you can hurt a child or change her for the worse by treating her poorly (belittling, berating, excessive punishing, limiting freedom, general meanness). You can exacerbate whatever genetic weakness may be lurking especially in the realm of mental health.

This movie seems to support that premise.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

I've heard the author of this book, Douglas Rushkoff, referred to as a futurist. I think that means someone who can see trends and extrapolate them to create a vision of the future. He's a professor of something that sounds like liberal arts but he clearly understands a lot about technology -- both the specifics of how it works and it's implications for our lives.

His premise is that corporations exist for growth. They must grown infinitely. Now, however, they have reached maximum growth. There is nowhere else to grow. No new markets, no extra planet. Even if that isn't true, he says the corporate model is broken because it does not serve humans. I think he'd say that the corporate model has more responsibility for the decline of the American worker than automation.

He suggests that we create businesses for reasons other than growth, and that growth as a strategy is already failing. Oddly, his solutions sound idyllic. We could live in a world where people are not overworked and anxious about their jobs. They are paid a good wage and have time to enjoy their lives because business will serve human interests.

I liked his ideas so much I joined his email list.

The title refers to the futility that most people in our economic system feel. He claims even CEOs do not like running a business with only the next quarterly investor call setting their priorities.  Maybe but we all perpetuate the system because we don't have a lot of choices.. CEOs could lead the way but they don't.

Educated

My aunt recommended this book when I told her I was searching for books by people who have overcome great difficulty. While that is an accurate description of Educated, it doesn't capture even 10% of themes of this book. This is a phenomenal memoir. I do not know how it became a bestseller by its publishing date but I certainly understand it.

Tara Westover lived an unusual life. She was raised in rural Idaho by people who could be described as the Taliban wing of the Mormon church. I thought all practicing Mormons were devout but the contrast between the Westover family and the Mormons of my childhood is vast. Her parents were survivalists. They didn't believe in school or medicine so the children received no education and no medical treatment in spite of many life threatening injuries. The kids worked with their dad in a scrap yard. I could go on but the summary is lots of terrible stuff happens.

The fascinating part of the story is the way Westover chronicles how she transforms from an abused and thoroughly brainwashed person into a woman who wins the fellowship to Cambridge to pursue a master's degree then PhD. 

Depending on your own childhood, you might experience this book differently from me. I had loving parents who defined loving their child as allowing the child to grow into whoever she wanted to be. Westover also had loving parents but in their family love was defined by obedience and loyalty and the extent to which each child would kneel to the will of their father and his vision of their family and the world.

If your parents were not so accepting, if you've had to live your adult life trying to heal from your own childhood, this book might be more painful than fascinating.

When I want to condemn Westover's parents for what they did to her, I am reminded of the book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.  Similar to the Westover parents, Amy Chua loves her children and felt that she knew what was best for them. She withheld her love from her children so they would be academic superstars and accomplished musicians-- identities she chose for them.  Their adherence to her will was the most important component to receiving her love.  That's a fairly accepted way of parenting among my peers. They want their children to succeed out of love for them (and if they're being honest, their own fear for them) so they force them to perform in school or sports or fulfill whatever identity the parents have selected. The children do not have a choice (or a very limited choice) in who they become.  It seems less violent but I am not sure by how much.

Yes, we (still) can!

Dan Pfieffer started working for Barack Obama in early 2007 when he was building his team to run for President.  He worked for him until 2015 ultimately serving as Director of Communications for the White House.

His book is filled with anecdotes about how they responded to the propaganda machines that existed to defeat Obama's goals.

Pfieffer is one of the hosts of my favorite podcast, Pod Save America. I know he is very smart and knowledgable about politics but I didn't love his book. It was unsatisfying.  Talking about life before Trump is like talking about the US before Sept. 11. Those rules no longer apply. Obama's team tried for years to negotiate and act like the opposition did not hate him personally. Hillary Clinton seemed to run on that premise as well.

Pfieffer's book became an immediate bestseller and that gives me some hope that there are lots of people like me who are spending more time on civic engagement than ever before. That said, we live under a gerrymandered congress that's supposed to be balanced by a gerrymandered presidency and, as a result, a gerrymandered supreme court. The odds are long.