Author: christinestaffa

My life's journey has taken me from the streets of New York, up the Hudson Valley, to a little goat farm under Vermont's highest mountain.

Antiblessings

  • Insomnia and the whole barrage of treatments worse than the ills
  • Found a tick in my navel this morning
  • Two mice in the house in two days

Sometimes it can be good to count your antiblessings! Because it’s kind of funny when everything starts piling on! Ha ha! What next!

Book Corner 2022.22

Chemistry

by Weike Wang

In the middle, it can feel rather depressing. The first-person protagonist, who I believe remains unnamed, had horrible parents, can’t finish her PhD, and can’t commit to the boyfriend who wants to marry her. There’s a quote which I’m afraid I didn’t bookmark, but which I think I got right: “The optimist believes the glass is half full. The pessimist believes it is half empty. The chemist believes it is full, half with liquid and half with gas, both of which are probably poisonous.” That’s the protagonist’s attitude all the way through.

You think she must have redeeming qualities which are not on display, this being written in the first-person depressive. Because why does Eric stay with her? She sounds relentlessly negative. But he is devoted to her; plus, she has a very warm relationship with “the best friend”. This is like the main character of Joan Is OK – she’s an oddball but things don’t quite go where you think they’re going to. These oddballs aren’t total losses. They function and have relationships. They are just human.

I want to shout out that the author has degrees in chemistry and public health as well as an MFA. Yay for scientists writing books!

Also This

I also unmucked this pretty much by myself. I don’t know exactly why or how I did these things. This was originally so high with wasted hay and muck, Florey was starting to have trouble climbing in & out. Somehow Florey alone managed to generate more waste than Florey plus Milky.

Would You Choose Water Over Wine?

This is the last day of my teetotality experiment. What I learned is that these are the times when I really, really felt the sacrifice:

  • Out for dinner with the husband. Ordered food. Sitting there. Want something interesting to drink and get me in the mood.
  • Xopher brings an interesting beer home. Damn.

Less so, but still annoying: Sometimes while cooking dinner. Already happy to be cooking dinner, but want to accentuate it, celebrate, treat myself, and take the edge off my hunger. This though is the kind of mindless filler-drinking I wanted to stop.

Tomorrow I’m having a big beer. Hopefully will drink more mindfully going forward.

One of those Great Things

I unmucked this barn all by myself. It was as high as the foundation. Over lunch hours and weekends. You just chip away at it and it gets done. I never did it all by myself before. And most of the time I wasn’t feeling at all well rested. X always says, many of the greatest things in history were done by people who weren’t feeling at all well at the time. Well, here’s one for the books.