Happiness is a Choice

Over at Nicole and Maggie's, there was a recent discussion in the comments about whether happiness is a choice -- whether we can, whatever the situation, choose to be happy. 

This is something I've been thinking about for a while now, since 2014 at least, because my kid's high school principal used to start every morning by instructing the kids that they could "have a good day -- or not! The choice is yours!" As a kid with depression and anxiety, who hadn't yet realized he was trans and was suffering all kinds of ways from that, he was infuriated by this bit of chipper banality.

Is happiness a choice? In the long (long, long) run, a little bit, maybe. When you're caught in external events (a job you hate, financial and health problems, a government which is hell-bent on destroying your rights and also the climate), things are not all right. You can't just chose to pretend they are all right. (Though people do! So maybe you can?) You can, sometimes, work to change those thing, and get to a place that's happier. 

Though can you? Right now, I'm feeling both anxious and unhappy about what's happening in this country, and to the environment. The rights of my kid are under constant attack. The rights of people like me to control our our bodies is under constant attack. Those attacks tells us clearly that our country, our community, our government, doesn't think people like us should even exist, much less have the freedom to make choices about what our lives are like. In the face of constant belittling scorn from those around us, it's hard to keep going, never mind being happy about it.

And there's nothing we can do about the environment. I mean, we recycle. But honestly I couldn't even think about buying an electric car, because there's no infrastructure in my community for such a vehicle. I can't ride a bike to work or to the store because my town keeps voting down bike paths, in favor of building more roads; and the roads we have currently are not safe for people on bikes.

In any case, dutifully recycling my cardboard is not saving the planet and walking to work is not saving the planet. The vast majority of carbon and pollution comes from corporations and manufacturing, and nothing I can do will change that. I can't even vote them out, because here in this solidly red state my vote is pointless.

I do also think "happiness" is at least partly a genetic thing. My mother was happy, all her life. She didn't choose that, I'm pretty sure. I remember once talking to her about my suicidal ideation. She was surprised. "I've never felt like that," she said. "I've gotten, well, down, sometimes. But never like that."

Since I consider suicide when I get a flat tire, this was hilarious to me. 

I don't think that difference has much to do with nurture, since if anything my mother had a much rougher childhood than I did. Though it might! She was given a lot of independence as a kid, cooking for and raising her two younger siblings; and she had a vast kinship network around her, so she had people she could turn to for help. Maybe that matters. 

I think you can choose to do things that will improve specific problems you're having (work towards a new job, for example) but I don't know if you can choose happiness. 

I've built my life to be pretty much what I wanted it to be -- I'm a professor who teaches fiction writing, for God's sake, which looked like an impossible goal when I was 23 years old and I first wistfully thought that would be a nice job to have; I spend most of my time reading and writing, which are the two things I love best.  I have a wonderful kid. I'm even getting enough exercise. I even have enough money, at least right now. These are all things I wanted and worked toward. Am I happy?

Well, I'm happier. But I still have anxiety and long stretches of depression. 

The fact that I now have enough money means that I hardly ever think about the best way to kill myself, or at least for not very long. Instead I remind myself that I have the money to fix the flat tire, (or even just buy new tires if I want!). That's a big help, but is "enough money" something I could have chosen earlier? It really was not. 

I mean, in theory, I could have chosen a job that paid more money, but really, could I have? The job best suited to me, writing and teaching writing, is not one that society values, so it doesn't pay much. If I'd chosen a better paying job that I hated, would I have been happier? 

I could have been a little more frugal, sure, but what made me poor was not buying fresh fruit for my kid, but having cancer when I was 29, a financial blow I've only just recovered from. That wasn't anything I chose. Nor did I choose to live in a country where one single serious illness could destroy my financial stability for the next thirty years. In hindsight, obviously I should have declared bankruptcy right away, instead of paying hospital bills for twenty years. I could have chosen that, sure.

Anyway! My point, and I have one, is that "choosing" happiness is a simplistic way of looking at the complicated mess/morass that is actual life. Most of us are doing the best we can in a tangled mess of circumstances, and telling us we should just cheer up is not a useful tactic. And it can feel like an attack, to be absolutely honest. If we could be happy, we would -- most of us, anyway.

End of Semester

I have submitted my grades. I still have to go in next Monday and Tuesday for interviews -- we're hiring a poet -- but aside from that I am D-O-N, done.

Now I can get started on all the million thing I have put off for months (cleaning out our closet, culling books, doing laundry). Also, I have book reviews due and a book to write.

Summer stretches before me like a blissful meadow. Except that middle part there, where the blistering heat settles in. UGH.

Today I am making bagels, doing laundry, and reading Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith.

 From Barry, over at Alas, A Blog:

See also:

Insomnia

 As long-time readers of the blog know, I have suffered from insomnia since I was literally a toddler. I can remember toddling around our house in the middle of the night when I was too small to see over window sills. It was worst in my adolescence, when I would frequently sleep only every other night; but it's still pretty bad.

I've been using a technique someone recommended here, listening to audiobooks until I fall asleep, and usually that works pretty well. Though not last night. Argh. It was too hot in the bedroom, and also my cat kept mewing insistently in my ear, until I got up and turned the water faucet on for them. They wanted a drink. No, they couldn't drink the water in their dish. Also, they wanted me to stand there and watch them drink the water. 

Anyway. One thing that has help me not suffer as much from the insomnia -- two things, really -- is research that shows even lying there away is helpful, since the brain gets some rest; and also another bit of research which says six hours of sleep is enough for a lot of people. (My pcp says at least seven and no more than eight.)

Last night it was about four hours of sleep, and about four hours of lying awake fretting. The audiobooks do cut down on the fretting, so that's nice.

Happy Birthday to My Kid

Twenty-six years ago right this minute, I was holding him for the first time. He looked like a little lobster.

We celebrated by taking him and his sweetie to Crystal Bridges to look at the art, including an exhibit of art made out of beetles and butterflies and rocks.

Outside Crystal Bridges -- the kid is the one in pink shorts

It was a splendid day, although the museum was also being visited by several high schools and a middle school. Still, you like to see that. Better than taking them to battlefields, which is what my high school did with these last weeks of school. 

End of the Semester

Thursday was the last day of classes. I have about ten days of grading to do, and then I am done until August.

Honestly this is the best part of teaching. What I want out of life is day after day with nothing to do but write books, write about books, and read books, and academia's lengthy breaks give that to me. Back when I was poor, I would have to teach four classes, all summer long, so I didn't get this break. It's nice to be able to afford not to teach in the summer.

Games I'm Playing

I like to start the day with coffee and a few games, to sort of wake my brain up, if you see what I mean.

These aren't games like video games -- they're more like puzzle games.

Twodle, Threedle, and Fourdle: more complicated versions of Wordle, which has gotten too easy for me.

Sudoku, which I play through an app.

Connections, which is still pretty hard for me. It kind of wants you to think sideways, which I have some trouble doing.

And I also do a couple lessons on Duolingo, which taught me to read French (I still don't speak it) and is now teaching me Portuguese. 

By the time I'm through those, I'm mostly awake, though I don't know if it's the coffee or the games.

What I'm Watching Now

I started Fallout and really didn't like it, maybe because I know nothing about the video game and have no idea what's going on. But I also knew nothing about the Last of Us, and I loved that one. Anyway, I quit watching Fallout halfway through the third episode.

There's a new season of Call the Midwife, and I'm enjoying it, though the show is now in 1970, and in my opinion the 1970s through the 1990s were the worst decades in history. God, the 70s sucked. No computers, wild inflation, appalling interest rates, and here comes Ronald Reagan. Gah. The 1980s were even worse. Things started improving somewhere around 1995, I think, but that may be because 1995 was when I got my first university position, and my life improved.

I'm also watching Unforgotten, which is free with Prime on Amazon. It's a British police procedural, about a murder squad that (so far) deals with historical cases -- that seems to be the term for cold cases in Britain. Murders that are 30 or 40 year old, that kind of thing. I like the lead, and I like how the show gives us the people surrounding the crime, showing us how the crimes have affected the community. Also there are like six seasons, so it'll keep me occupied for a bit.

Unforgotten trailer

Passover Has Been Held

 We did our Seder last night, with just the four of us. The original Seder would have had more people, but it could not be held.

The menu was roast chicken, potato kugel, matzoh ball soup, and various sweets of affliction (cake made with matzoh meal, those little KFP fruits slices, macaroons). We had to take the kids home directly after the Seder, since they're both working today. I took a picture, but it did not come out.

We're going up to spend the kid's birthday with him. That's the next event!

Links

Why people are leaving the academy

Imagine that you’ve got a budget that can’t cover the cost of four tires on your car, so you decide to maintain three, but the fourth one…well, we’ll just let it wear out, go bald, go flat, maybe shred itself to pieces as you drive down the freeway. The car still runs, it’s maybe just a bit unsafe and kind of inefficient and making horrible noises while you drive. Is that a smart move?

MAGA Americans are doing their best to convince us that the student protests are violent, and that this violence is Biden's fault. (Why are you asking about January 6? What does that have to do with anything?)

Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) have demanded that Biden mobilize the National Guard to protect Jewish Americans on campus. 

Like Tom Cotton gives a shit about Jews. This is exactly what the GOP is doing with trans people -- oo, we need to protect women, oo, what about women's sports? They don't care about women or women's sports, except as a cudgel to attack trans people. They don't care about Jews, except as a way to attack Biden. 

Also, check JD Vance, who is using the same rhetoric that got four students at Kent State killed: these protestors are dirty, so we should shoot them.

Of course, all this will work with our reactionary conservatives, since they don't care what's true; they just want some way to justify their bigotry, and today's GOP works hard to give them that.

Cat tricks

If you're not reading Jo Walton's columns, do you even SF, bro?

So there's this poem I like to assign to my students:

[you fit into me]

BY MARGARET ATWOOD

you fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye

They never understand it, which puzzled me, until recently, when I realized none of them know what a hook-and-eye is. Dead metaphor kills poem.

What I'm Reading Now

 Not much that I can share with you, because I'm reading for reviews. But here are a couple!

Michiko Aoyama, What You Are Looking for Is in the Library

This is a short and charming novel, translated from the Japanese, about five characters who separately interact with a local librarian and have their lives changed. The characters interact with one another occasionally, but their stories are more like short stories, all connected through the library and the librarian.

Besides being five stories with five different happy endings, this novel also gives a fascinating look at life in contemporary Japan. Obviously I don't know how accurate the portrayal is, but we're shown a culture and a civilization that works, with trains that come every three minutes and libraries as well as community resources that are well funded, and people who are able to start small businesses without worrying about things like health care costs and paying back student loans.

Aoyama Michiko's work reminds me a bit of the novels written by Fredrik Backman and Alexander McCall Smith -- kind of sweet, maybe a little sappy, but wonderful characters and careful observations of how people live and function, without any high drama or murders or abuse. If you're looking for a pleasant read on a rainy afternoon, you'll like this one.

Percival Everett, James: A novel

This is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the point of view of Jim, who you will remember is the slave Huck ends up rafting down the Mississippi with. I'm a sucker for novels which retell other novels, giving us a new lens with which to read the source text, and in that regard this one succeeds.

It doesn't really bring much new to the table, though. Though I may just think this because I know so much about the history of enslaved people in the U.S. Consider, in contrast, Jo Baker's Longbourn, which retells Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants in Longbourn. I like that one a lot, because it shows me things I didn't already know about working class life in England at that date. Here in Everett's novel, I know most of the things he's showing us -- code switching; why black people at the time acted stupid around white people; how enslaved people were treated; what Jim might have felt in dealing with young white boys in that place and culture. So none of that really felt fresh or interesting to me.

Also, I really don't like the original source text, Twain's novel. Despite Hemmingway's claim that this is the first American novel, it's badly structured and most of it is just Twain amusing himself at the expense of the actual narrative. Also I don't think Tom Sawyer is cute or funny, so it always annoys me when he shows up on the page. 

Still, this is an interesting and readable text, and if you want to look at Twain's novel from a new perspective, this one is worth your time.

Funder, Anna, Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Here, Anna Funder writes about the wife of George Orwell (Eric Blair), demonstrating that Eileen O'Shaughnessy was instrumental in the creation of Orwell's major works, not just in editing and reading and typing drafts, but in supplying many of the ideas and passages that end up in Orwell's work. Despite this, O'Shaughnessy has been -- continues to be -- nearly erased from any biographies and critical studies of Orwell and his work. Using tactics borrowed straight from Orwell's Politics and the English Language, the biographers and critics manage this by using passive tense, and by simply omitting to mention that, for example, O'Shaughnessy was in Catalonia with Orwell while he was writing Homage to Catalonia.

Funder intersperses her observations about Orwell and O'Shaughnessy with observations about her own life, and the lives of the woman around her, demonstrating how women are encouraged to erase themselves in favor of acting as support staff for the men in their lives. This is an interesting read, with lots of chewy points to consider.

George Orwell, A Clergyman's Daughter

I read this after I read Funder's book. Except for Animal Farm and 1984, this is the only book my public library has by Orwell. It's from 1935, and so an early book. His second novel, Wikipedia tells me. It's very odd, though you can see the influence of his research for Down and Out in Paris and London. There's a whole section where the daughter. Dorothy Hare, spends part of a summer with hop pickers, living like a migrant worker. And an overarching narrative has to do with why Hare never marries: she is terrified of having sex. (According to Funder's book, Orwell disliked and was disgusted by sex.) This terror limits her life. 

Structurally, the book is a mess. If I were his editor, I would have made him cut the entire hop section, and make that a different book. He would have had to think about Hare as a character, though, and I don't think Orwell thinks women are really people. Anyway, the book is really two separate tales: the one in which Hare runs her father's house and deals with church affairs, all the while being kept criminally short of money by her father. Then there's a section about Hare after she has a sudden and unexplained bout of amnesia. She wanders the countryside, takes up with the hop pickers, returns to London and lives on the streets, finds and takes a job as an underpaid instructor in a dreadful girl's school, and eventually returns home to take up life as her father's daughter once again.

Orwell shows us the life of migrant workers, of homeless people in London, of how terrible small schools run for a profit can be, and how grim the life of a technically upper class but actually impoverished clergy can be. The only thing holding all this together is the putative main character, who doesn't really take action so much as she is acted upon.

I mean, I read the whole thing. But it's a mess.

New Fridge

 Delivery was right on time:

It's a little smaller than our old one, but there's only two of us now, if you don't count cats and the little dog.

Ugh, Our Fridge Died

 To be fair, it was 30 years old -- we bought it before the kid was born -- but we were planning to celebrate Passover tomorrow, and Dr. Skull had already started the elaborate process which leads to his amazing matzoh ball soup. The process requires a working fridge, since the broth has to be chilled overnight and then cooked again, with a "raft," which is made of ground chicken, various vegetables, and eggs.

Anyway, I ordered a new fridge online (we're living in the future!) and it will be here tomorrow. We've moved the actual Passover celebration until Friday.

The fridge was $200 off, so that's nice. Plus they will haul away the old fridge.

ETA: I forgot the worst part. I had already cleaned house for the celebration. So now I have to clean house TWICE.

ETA Two: We have moved everything we're hoping will survive the night into an ice chest with plenty of ice. Fingers crossed. We found ever so many unexpected things in the way back of the fridge, including two bottles of wine and a bottle of Granny Smith hard cider, which I am consuming as we speak.

Delivery of the new refrigerator is scheduled for "first available time" tomorrow. I'm hoping before noon.

Work Is Eating My Life

I'm chairing the hiring committee for the new assistant professor we're hiring in Creative Writing/Poetry, which is a lot of reading and evaluating of CVs, letters, and transcripts. As usual for my university, we're hiring at precisely the wrong point in the semesters. There is pretty much no way we can bring someone on campus for an in-person interview until after the end of Spring Semester, is what I'm saying.

But we're doing Zoom interviews this week, which should help us winnow down the candidate pool.

Also everyone's big papers (40 of these) and the finished scripts from the scriptwriting class (ten of these) are coming in this week.

I haven't mentioned this, but I am retiring next spring, May of 2025. This past week has cemented my belief that that decision was the right one.

Review of My Clarkesworld Short Story

 It's a YouTube video review of the whole issue -- the review of my story starts at 34:47:

Spoilers: She likes it!