Reflections of book club and of 39 years of life

I love my book club.

We have been together for 5.5 years (I think... or is it 6.5 years?) I think it is 5.5 years because I am pretty sure my son was just shy of one year. It is a great core group of women. One of my best friends suggested starting it to my other best friend and myself way back when. We each invited 2-3 women and wa la. Here we are 5.5 years later.

Last night we noted that it was our original core group of women. We have added to the group, but it is interesting to me that none of the newer additions seem to have as strong of a commitment to the group and I am not sure why. I wonder if those of us there from the start just had a stronger investment? Or if we failed in making other people feel welcome? Or maybe some of both.

Last night I failed to even buy the book. I had excellent intentions actually, but the book I was reading, "The Girl Who Played With Fire" just kept going on and on. And I am not one of those people who can successfully read two books at once. I must finish one before starting another.

The book was The Alchemist and I did read a primer and a few spoilers and reviews on the book before going to book club so that I wasn't completely clueless. But yes, I did a lot of smiling and nodding. As the conversation went on I actually did have a lot of thoughts to add based off of the flow of conversation, though I didn't so much because it isn't my thing to jump in and yap about a book I didn't read. I was there just to enjoy the company.

Thoughts on the book were all over the place, from one woman who absolutely loved the book and would put it in her top two (or did she say five) to others who said, "eh". That's par for the course with our book club. We rarely get across the board agreement on a book, yet we all still love each other.

A few of the thoughts really resonated with me. How do you move throughout your life? How do you make the decisions you make? Why do you make the decisions you make? Are there omens? Are there signs? What if you get to the end of your life and well, it sucked? Are you the only one to blame? Is that because you were ignoring the signs? What is happiness in life?

Huge questions.

The woman who loved the book made me want to read it most when she talked about how in her life, she goes along a bit and then evaluates - "am I happy?" If yes, great. If not, "how do I make it better? How do I fix it?" Then make it happen.

I can completely identify with this.

When I was growing up and through college I let things happen. I rarely made things happen for myself. Things just happened around me. I followed the crowd, I did what others did. If it made them happy, certainly it would make me happy, right? I majored in chemistry because I did well in it, not because I loved lab class (though I fell in love with my lab partner).

I think I got this from my parents. They are/were both great people, but they were young when I was little. Things happened to them, and while they both got better at making things happen for themselves as they got older, my early formative years saw them as being thrown around by circumstances and not in charge of the circumstances.

It wasn't until I graduated from college, worked for a year, applied (unsuccessfully) to grad schools my advisor told me to apply to, that I really realized it was up to me to pick myself up, quit whining about things that have happened to me - because really, I had a great upbringing and life and a future wide open to me - and make things happen for me.

I applied to grad school again and picked myself up and moved a few states away to a mid-range school that seemed to fit. It was the single hardest thing I have ever done, but really my first jumping off point.

Many of my decisions have been gut reactions. What feels right? Then do it.

I have had to remind myself a few times to take the reigns and make things happen for myself. I can only really rely on myself to know and do what is right for me.

I have talked a few times before about making decisions to change course, to make myself happier, to move myself in a different direction. I have recently made another move in life to make things just a smidge better. I finally realized that in my career I have been doing what is expected of me as a scientist. What my mentor a few years ago wanted for me. I kept ignoring and denying a direction that was popping up for me.

In October I decided to listen to that inner voice and make the step to follow a different career path. I went and talked to a few people who have since jumped onto my team and have encouraged me to follow a new path and have even gone so far as to put me into positions to enable me to further this career path.

I look at my path since leaving Colorado for grad school and I have to say, it just keeps getting better. 39 years so far (that realization is starting to hurt my gut), 15 years of following my heart and wow.

Who knew it could be so good?

Things I Like Part One: Books

The first book I ever learned to read was called “Cat and Dog”. It isn’t terribly pc anymore, the dog threatened to do all sorts of things to the cat, including making a “catcoat”. But I loved that book and read – I mean memorized it and would “read” it to my parents over and over. My love for reading, like many people I know, has thrived over the decades.

I know I have blogged many times about books and reading. I thought I would start a post series on things I like. Here is post number one – books.

The last few months my need to read has accelerated. I believe it to be pure escapism. When I am laying in bed in the evening, it is easier to escape into a book than lie there thinking about “stuff”. I think about work, which isn’t a bad thing. But it isn’t like I need to think about work at that time of night. I think about my kids. Are they sleeping well? What are they dreaming about? Will Skadi wake up tonight? How many times will I have to put her back to bed? Are the kids breathing? Did they get wrapped up in their blankets too tightly? I better go check on them.

Then my main reason for escapism lately, I miss my mom. Please God be taking care of her. Is she watching over us? Were there things left unsaid? How is Rick doing? What is the life celebration going to be like? Am I going to be able to hold it together in church this week? Why? Why her?

And then the inevitable… Will I get the same cancer? What can I do to make sure I don’t? Do I need to go to the doctor? What if it is genetic? Can they do genetic testing? What if my kids get cancer? What is up with that funny two toned mole on Leif’s finger?

The thought process above? That is why I have been inhaling books lately. Check out my GoodReads.com list if you don’t believe me.

In September 2009 I finished “The Good Earth” by Pearl S. Buck after 3 months of reading. Loved it. I moved on easily to “Shanghai Girls”, similar genre and era, but told from the opposite perspective of Buck’s book. Loved it as well.

After I finished “Shanghai Girls” in January, I hit a stride that is still going strong.

“Look Me in the Eye: My Life With Asperger’s” (blogged about previously.)
“Embroideries” by Satrapi
“Twilight”
“New Moon”
“Stones into Schools”
“Eclipse”
“Breaking Dawn”
“The Help”
“Garlic and Sapphires”

I read them all between February and now. This is a lot for me. I know people who are fast readers. I am not ashamed to admit that I am a slow reader. Very slow.

I have three books started right now:

“American Pie: Slices of Life (and Pie) from America’s Back Roads” – I picked it up off my mom’s bookshelf while I was in Colorado shortly after her passing.

“The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters” – a book recommended to me by an online friend and it fit straight in with my favorite genre, historical fiction, particularly of the North American west.

Then my sister sent me my mom’s Kindle. Before I register it in my own name (and lose her downloads) I decided to read the books on there that I am interested in. My mom raved repeatedly about “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” shortly after she read it. It was on my Amazon wish list. I am 14% complete with that (Kindle fulfills my analytical analytical nature for quantitation) and certain that it must be spectacular for my mom to rave about it since it opens up talking about a widower who lost his wife to cancer at a young age. Bitter, not seeing the sweet yet, though I know if my mom did, I will too.

I am loving the Kindle so far. I have the Kindle ap on my iPhone, but I rarely use it. Only when I am stuck somewhere, by myself (i.e., no kids in tow begging for games on the phone), and bored of Fruit Ninja or Skeeball or Cribbage. Kindle for the iPhone is fine, but I am not wow’d.

I am wow’d by the real Kindle.

AB and I have opposite bedtime rituals. He showers and crawls into bed in complete darkness, with no distractions (yes, I like to talk, but I curb this) and falls asleep (hopefully). He struggles with falling asleep. I get into bed and read. I grew up reading myself to sleep. We have gone around about this a few times, I don’t like to get up and sit downstairs and read. I like to read in bed. And the reading lights are all too bright for him to sleep.

So like my preteen self, I hide under the blankets with my book and reading light until AB starts to snore. Kindle is a serious enabler here. At 8 ounces and with no pages to flip against the sheets I can read and read and read. Once AB is snoring I can carefully come out of hiding and resume being 38 and not 10.

I have a stack of books in waiting – my next book club book: “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” which I am really looking forward to. I am envisioning a book something like Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony”, which I read in college and loved. I also have “The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner” sitting on my bedside table.

On the floor, waiting to move on deck is “My Life in France” by Julia Child followed by a good 10 other books I have picked up in the last few years, but not yet cracked.

Things I like? Books are up around number one.

It wasn't supposed to happen!

When my good friend Melissa, loaned me a book, I wasn't going to like it. She had to push it on me. I don't have time for a 500 page book, I whined.

My goal in reading it was to check it off my list, be able to whine about it at book club in May and move on my way.

Because I am not a huge fan of uber-popular fiction.

I like biographies, and historical fiction, survivor stories, and exploration stories.

Not stories targeting teenage girls.

I usually read the "big" books well after the fact and then wander around going - "I don't know what the big deal about that book was..." (Thinking specifically of The DaVinci Code, but log Harry Potter here too - I am on book 2 of reading it to Leif and while it's alright, I don't find it to be all that.)

I don't read horror books or stories of the supernatural. The closest I have come to horror would be the Red Dragon series by Thomas Harris. And I certainly don't read Vampire novels.

Sigh.

Until now.

I am plowing through "Stones Into Schools" (which I find truly inspirational and amazing, I loved Three Cups of Tea) so that I can read "Critical Chain" for work and THEN and only then, can I resume my guilty teenaged girl pleasure and pick up...

New Moon.

Into the Wild and into one's head

I finally got around to watching Into the Wild this weekend. AB and I had every intention of seeing it in the theater, but it never happened. We finally sat aside a night when we got both kids to bed by 8:30am and were able to stay up and watch it.

I loved it. I really, really liked it.

Of course this comes as no surprise given that it is one of my favorite books ever.

We read this book for book club about a year or so ago where I was flat out surprised that the vast majority of my book club, did not hold the book in the same regard as I did.

The phrase, "dumbass" was thrown around with wild abandon that night. Most people liked the writing and the fact that Krakour did an amazing job with investigative journalism. But very few people could identify with the protagonist and therefore, had little interest or regard for the book.

Have you ever longed to walk away? To survive? To test the limits of your body? To reject social stature? To know what it feels like to scrape by? To move yourself where the wind carried you? To escape the criticisms looming over you?

Both as I read the book and as I watched the movie I marvelled that my husband hadn't done more of this growing up. He IS that type. He is fascinated by survival and the wild. He grew up in Alaska where I think you need to have a little of that survivalist nature within you to love the place. My husband has A LOT of that in him.

After the movie AB did remind me that when Chris (the main character) died in the backwoods of Alaska, he was in fact sleeping on a beach in a tent in Alaska. AB worked and earned a good wage that summer, but saw little point to having a roof over his head when the money would go better towards tuition. For Chris, the money he had would go better to feed someone.

When we were in college, AB would head out walking by himself. He would walk into the foothills of Boulder and make his way around. After we had been dating for awhile I often went with him and I loved walking without really knowing where we were going or how long we would be gone. One trip in particular I remember walking in the hills outside Steamboat for about a day. Another time it was Moab.

I get Chris.

I tend towards being the solitary type and I think AB does as well. I understand finding peace within nature and the desire to live off the land.

My dream of living off the land has always been in retirement where few people will depend on us for their needs or worry about us. The last thing I would ever want to do is worry someone. In my dreams I see a cabin in the mountains with a garden where I grow food and preserve my own food. But I also see having a vehicle and a town to drive to for groceries... and an internet connection... and an airport nearby so I can go see my kids anytime I want. Still, some level of self-sustainability under my own energy is something I want to experience.

Chris was finding himself. I found myself at a few different points in my life. First was a conscious decision in college to quit dating and figure out who I was and what I liked. It scared me when I realized I could name my ex-boyfriend's favorite bands, but couldn't name my own. The next time I found myself was when I left Colorado and in a more urban sense than Chris, was forced to figure things out for myself as a grad student living paycheck to paycheck.

Where my criticisms come of Chris are in points left off of the movie. In the book, it was known early on that the Bus he died in was about one mile from a regularly traveled road. I am sure this point was neglected in the movie to escape the notions of "what a dumbass" instead of sympathy for the lead character dying alone and lonely. Still this was a criticism in the book, that he landed at the Bus and never ventured far enough away from his home point during those long months, to really know what surrounded him.

AB added to this notion the other night when I told him the Bus was a mile from the road by saying, "well duh, anyone could have figured that out. Buses don't just get dropped out in the middle of nowhere Alaska. There HAD to be a road nearby."

Oh yeah. Good point.

Second, Chris was unprepared. My friends and I have routinely teased my husband about being prepared for anything. When we have gone camping with friends, AB will frequently pack every coat in our house. Not because we will need them, but someone else might not have one. He carries boots in his car and gloves nearly all the time. And we always have food in our car for long trips - and not just because we get the munchies. In case of emergency. AB is my ultimate boy scout. Prepared for anything.

So while I "get" Chris, I also feel he should have been smarter. And he should have let his parents and sister at least know he was alive.

When he was.

Leif was right

This morning as we were TRYING to get out of the house, Leif called me asking me to bring the camera.

He insisted I needed to get a picture of he and Skadi together.

It was one of those mornings where I knew I had so much to do, but also knew that insisting that we get out the door would end up taking far longer with a cranky boy then just grabbing the camera and snapping a few pictures.

Well, Leif was right. I managed the elusive smiling shot of two children.

Here is "Hamburger Lip" and his sister.

Of course if I were a really savy photographer I would have photoshopped out the Hamburger lip. But it is 9:53pm and I really am determined to get through the April book club book, Three Cups of Tea. (Yes, I *have* been reading it for two months now... and people wonder why I am contemplating an adjunct position in my book club.)