The Last Day; My Own Particular Brand of Odd

Invocation for a New Year

May you

be enchanted by life.

May you . . . 

wonder,

wander,

ponder;

Lose your sense of self

through connection

to your surroundings,

large and small,

distant and immediate,

personal and natural,

Feel awe every day;

Marvel in the ordinary;

Connect to the rhythms

of the cycles of

waking and sleeping,

lightness and darkness,

warmth and cold,

growth and decay,

activity and recovery,

productivity and rejuvenation;

Find your cycles are spirals,

each revolution through the familiar

providing new perspectives,

deeper truths,

added insights,

accumulated layers and lessons and practices;

Lightly embrace the inevitability of

sadness and illness,

weakness and weariness,

anger and frustration,

guilt and embarrassment,

as ephemeral and temporary;

Boldly embrace finitude and powerlessness,

nonsense and ignorance,

the power of not knowing,

the awesome mysteriousness of it all;

Look for the good

in yourself,

in others,

in everything;

Know you are connected,

interconnected,

woven into the web,

reciprocal,

defined by mutuality;

Seek to learn,

understand,

change,

grow,

improve what you can,

know that helping others helps you;

Be equally helped and loved in return

in positive spiraling cycles;

Tell stories that

make the world better,

that

create belief in a better world;

Be curious,

Be silly,

Be adventurous,

Be empathetic,

Be accepting,

Be wise,

Be one,

Be embedded in existence.

I don't have many rituals for celebrating the new year, don't go to parties or make resolutions, but I always try to acknowledge it in some way with a post here. This is it this time.

The one other thing I've consistently done for many years is create a "favorites" book list or two related to my work as a librarian. I have always been a Youth Services Librarian, so have always created lists of youth and teen books. My library has undergone a restructuring in 2024, though, that has eliminated "Youth Services" as an official department and job designation, so now I'm simply a Librarian. My reading habits have shifted a bit, so this year's wrap-up list is a bit different.

Books I Read in 2024 That I Rather Quite Liked

"When people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir--here's what *MY experience* was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop." - John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed. "Be eclectic and enigmatic." - Me. "Be obscure and inscrutable." - Also me.

• The Mysteries by Bill Watterson
• The Weirdness of the World by Eric Schwitzgebel
• Monster Portraits by Sofia Samatar
• The Remarkable Rescue at Milkweed Meadow by Elaine Dimopoulos
• Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women's Words by Jenni Nuttall
• Grounded by Aisha Saeed
• The Collectors, ed. by A.S. King
• 
  Abuela, Don't Forget Me by Rex Ogle
• Mid-Air by Alicia Williams
• The Story of Gumluck the Wizard by Adam Rex
• Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World by Kristin Ohlson
• The Eternal Return of Clara Hart by Louise Finch
• Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
• The Broken Lands by Kate Milford
• The Eyes & the Impossible by Dave Eggers
• Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough by Dina Nayeri
• The Fight for Midnight by Dan Solomon
• Scurry by Mac Smith
• Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir by Pedro Martin
• Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene
• Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus by Dusti Bowling
• Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra
• Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky
• The Book of Stolen Dreams by David Farr
• Kariba by Daniel Clarke
• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
• Thieves' Gambit by Kayvion Lewis
• The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony by Jay Van Bavel
• Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso
• Middlewest by Skottie Young
• Assassin's Apprentice (graphic novel), Vol. 1 by Robin Hobb
• The Daughter's War by Christopher Buehlman
• Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
• Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine
• Kindling by Traci Chee
• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemison
• Eye of a Little God by A.J. Steiger
• The Five Impossible Tasks of Eden Smith by Tom Llewellyn
• The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher
• The Supernatural Society by Rex Ogle
• Ultraviolet by Aida Salazar
• Unraveller by Frances Hardinge
• Hummingbird Season by Stephanie Lucianovic
• Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Tali Sharot

"Favorite" might be too strong a word for some, perhaps even many, of them, but that's my list.

Speaking of end-of-year-lists, I noticed interesting themes in Adult Nonfiction here:

[My] Library’s Most Checked-out Books in 2024

1. “Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere”
2. “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year”
3. “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: Staying Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in Our Current Chaos”
4. “Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms”
5. “The Backyard Bird Chronicles”
6. “The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom”
7. “Mere Christianity: A Revised and Amplified Edition”
8. “What An Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds”
9. “Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts”
10. “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church”

God, Birds, and Calm.

I am a conduit for nonsense.

An add for t-shirt with that phrase has been showing up on my Facebook feed lately, and I rather quite like it.

Top quote from Christmas Day: Our eldest, 11, handed my wife the gift he got for her and before she could unwrap it said, "I hope you like it; I'm sorry we ruined the one you used to have when we were little."

"Don't ruin the surprise by giving it away before she sees it," I said.

"We've ruined SO many things over the years, that doesn't narrow it down at all."

(It was a replacement Doctor Who Tardis beach towel.)

I have always yearned to be some combination of Strider, Gandalf, and Hobbit. A blending or synthesis, junction or layering.

Now, I don't mean Aragorn at the end of the tale, the elf-friend of high blood lineage who becomes king, but his more anonymous guise as Strider when the adventurers first meet him. Mysterious, a bit dangerous and intimidating, and stealthy. The capable outdoorsman who knows the land and all the trails, skilled in survival and combat. The overseer of the wilds, connected to nature, and protector, from the shadows, of the people.

Gandalf the wise and wily. Deeply experienced and knowledgeable. Knower of secret and arcane lore. Relatively simple in appearance, manner, needs, and expectations, yet immensely powerful when called upon. The inveterate wizard, master of magic.

Hobbits for their modest contentment, appreciation for the simple and mundane. Peaceful, hard-working, happy, and humble.

There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

...

Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.

...

I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.

-----

Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits.

"Who is that?" Frodo asked, when he got the chance to whisper to Mr. Butterbur. "I don't think you introduced him?"

"Him?" said the landlord in an answering whisper, cocking an eye without turning his head. "I don't rightly know. He is one of the wandering folk--Rangers we call them. He seldom talks: not but what he can tell a rare tale when he has the mind. He disappears for a month, or a year, and then he pops up again. What his right name is I've never heard: but he's known round here as Strider."

-----

Gandalf is often described in The Lord of the Rings as quick to anger, and equally quick to laugh. His deep wisdom and compassion clearly derived from the patience he learned in Valinor, just as his care for all creatures of good will must have come from his strong sense of compassion for the weak. Both his patience and sense of kindness were revealed again and again, extending even to the servants of his enemies.

Keen observers of Gandalf often detected a veiled power, usually revealed in his eyes, which appeared deep and wise. He was alternately affectionate and brusque; he often surprised others with his bluntness when time was of the essence. Gandalf consistently upbraided foolish behaviour, but also richly rewarded those who acted with good intentions.

Hobbits appealed to him more than to the other Wizards, and he went often to the Shire for respite from errands. His attachment was likely because the Shire was of more bliss and peaceful than other inhabited realms of Middle-earth.

I can't claim to know exactly what that combination looks like, but all three resonate with me and inform who I try to be.

Perhaps it looks a little bit like my new sun hat for Christmas.

In my younger years I never enjoyed wearing hats--too cumbersome, hot, itchy, and uncomfortable. I trained myself to wear cool, wide-brimmed sun hats when we had kids, though, for the sun protection. And now I've gotten so used to it that I don't like to go without.

Which had me contemplating this past year getting something more quality than the cheap ones I have. Every time I looked for ideas, though, what I found came with associations I don't want to claim as an identity: cowboy, pirate, outback, Indiana Jones, gambler, etc. I wanted something that is my own particular brand of odd. And, after much searching, think I found something that will do the trick.

[Spouse] bought it for me as a gift and I've spent the days since adding some flair to make it more unique. It's taken a lifetime of insecurity, but I think I'm finally ready to let my inside show a bit more on the outside. Not for cosplay, but for regular use. My new "look," if you will.

(For the curious - The golden sun coin in the center is Shire Mint Post's interpretation of Mad Sweeney's lucky coin from Neil Gaiman's American Gods; [Spouse] got it for me for a previous Christmas a few years back; it was the whimsical little mouth blowing leaves that solidified my decision to use it. The feather I found by the staff door walking out of work a few months ago, a gift from the skies just lying there waiting to be found; I've had it on my desk until now. The thick coin with runes tucked into the band is Shire Mint Post's viking Vegvisir Wayfinder coin, another previous gift; according to the Internet, the three symbols fully showing mean Guidance, Protection, and Direction. The oak leaf and acorn are wood carvings I made recently hoping to find a use along these lines. The dragonfly I bought on Etsy a few years back to represent a companion animal for one of my D&D characters. I'm not sure where the quill and scroll coin came from, but I had it in my treasure chest. The simple wooden feather pin was something we kept from my mom's jewelry collection.)

I was going to hold off on adding more general content until the next post, but I love this quote that George Lakoff shared on Facebook so much that I've decided not to wait.

The brain is not neutral; it is not a general-purpose device. It comes with a structure, and our understanding of the world is limited to what our brains can make sense of. 

Some of our thought is literal—framing our experience directly. But much of it is metaphoric and symbolic, structuring our experience indirectly but no less powerfully.

Some of our mechanisms of understanding are the same around the world. But many are not, not even in our own country and culture. Our brains and minds work to impose a specific understanding on reality, and coming to grips with that can be scary, that not everyone understands reality in the same way. 

That fear has major political consequences. Since the brain mechanisms for understanding reality are mostly unconscious, an understanding of understanding itself becomes a political necessity.

-- "The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics"

The brain is not neutral. Even if we strive for neutrality, our brains won't go there. It's an important awareness to have.

And since I'm sharing that . . . I also found this article intriguing. (I'm sure George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, would approve.)

How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?

English continues to expand into diverse regions around the world. The question is whether humanity will be homogenized as a result.

In 2010, a new goddess, about two feet tall and cast in bronze, was set to appear in a village within the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. She looked nothing like the deities of Hindu mythology. In lieu of Durga’s bright saris or Lakshmi’s opulent jewels, she wore a wide-brimmed hat and the robes of the Statue of Liberty. She wasn’t riding a lion or a swan; she stood on a desktop computer. Instead of a sword or a spear, she held a pen in one hand and the Indian constitution—with its promise of legalized equality—in the other. Her name was Angrezi Devi, the Goddess English, and she was intended for India’s Dalits, or “untouchables.”

“The Goddess English can empower Dalits, giving them a chance to break free from centuries of oppression,” her creator, the prominent Dalit writer Chandra Bhan Prasad, declared. He saw English as an immensely valuable resource for the Dalit. “Will English-speaking Dalits be expected to clean gutters and roads?” he asked. “Will English-speaking Dalits be content to work as menials at landlords’ farms?” An atheist, he designed the goddess in order to infuse English into the Dalit identity, propelling his people from a feudal subaltern standing to the ranks of the modern and independent. “Learning English has become the greatest mass movement the world has ever seen,” he wrote.

He had a point. An estimated 1.5 billion people—roughly one in every five human beings—speak English, making it the most widely used language in the history of humanity. With an official status in the U.N., NATO, the W.T.O., and the E.U., it reigns as the dominant “lingua franca of the world,” Rosemary Salomone writes in “The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language” (Oxford). Like other colonial tongues, it spread first through “conquest, conversion, and commerce,” she notes, but its spread today is powered by a fourth process, what Salomone calls “collusion.” Around the globe, people pursue English and the opportunities it promises. “Korean mothers move their children to anglophone countries to learn in English,” Salomone observes. “Dutch universities teach in it. ASEAN countries collaborate in it. Political activists tweet in it.” . . . 

Many researchers find another reason to worry about the spread of English: the prospect of cognitive hegemony. Languages, they argue, influence how we perceive and respond to the world. The idiosyncrasies of English—its grammar, its concepts, its connection to Western culture—can jointly produce an arbitrary construction of reality. . . . 

"Each of my languages comes not only with its own patterns of sound and methods for arranging words but also with its social habits and its judgments about what to forgive, what to condemn, and what to revere,” Julie Sedivy writes in “Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Born in what was then Czechoslovakia, Sedivy grew up in a “linguistic bedlam,” hopping between Austria and Italy before settling down in Montreal. She was acquainted with five languages by kindergarten and went on to study how people learn and process language. Science suffuses her book, yet, as a way of knowing, it coexists with experience; the resulting volume isn’t so much a standard pop-sci book as it is a rhapsodic meditation on loving, taming, and forgetting words. She senses that distinct cognitive styles are tied to the different languages she speaks, comparing them to personalities bickering for the spotlight. “I am a cacophony of voices, influencing each other, at times assisting each other, at times getting in each other’s way, always vying for turf,” she writes.

Testimony from polyglots like her has invited a more sophisticated take on Whorf’s ideas. What if language is less like a yoke than like a wind, nudging us in various directions? . . . 

In a recent review of the research literature, the language scientist Damián E. Blasi, along with Majid and others, listed the many cognitive domains that English seems to affect, including memory, theory of mind, spatial reasoning, event processing, aesthetic preferences, and sensitivity to rhythm and melody. Languages help shape the worlds we inhabit less through a few grammatical rules than through countless subtle distinctions. John McWhorter might have been right that the effect of any single linguistic feature is minor. But, as Isaac Newton realized when developing calculus, innumerable tiny effects create large-scale patterns. . . . 

Although Prasad disagrees with the ideologues of the B.J.P. about the proper place for English in India, they all agree that English is powerful. Putting aside the economic opportunities it unlocks, they see the language as a psychosocial force—one that is rooted in its foreign origins and that, rather like Hinduism’s divine triumvirate, can create, sustain, or destroy social orders. Bourdieu’s suggestion that the spread of English represents a form of cognitive hegemony is one that Prasad and the B.J.P. accept, whether as a blessing or as a curse.

Our brains and minds work to impose a specific understanding on reality, and coming to grips with that can be scary, that not everyone understands reality in the same way.

And, since I've started down this road, one more.

The Walmart Effect

They find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. . . . 

Fully assessing the impact of an entity as dominant as Walmart, however, is a complicated task. The cost savings for consumers are simple to calculate but don’t capture the company’s total effect on a community. The arrival of a Walmart ripples through a local economy, causing consumers to change their shopping habits, workers to switch jobs, competitors to shift their strategies, and suppliers to alter their output. . . . 

Their conclusion: In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.

In theory, however, those people could still be better off if the money that they saved by shopping at Walmart was greater than the hit to their incomes. According to a 2005 study commissioned by Walmart itself, for example, the store saves households an average of $3,100 a year in 2024 dollars. Many economists think that estimate is generous (which isn’t surprising, given who funded the study), but even if it were accurate, Parolin and his co-authors find that the savings would be dwarfed by the lost income. They calculate that poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios. . . . 

Workers in counties where a Walmart opened experienced a greater decline in earnings than they made up for with cost savings, leaving them worse off overall. Even more interesting, he finds that the losses weren’t limited to workers in the retail industry; they affected basically every sector from manufacturing to agriculture. . . . 

The theory is complex, and goes like this: When Walmart comes to town, it uses its low prices to undercut competitors and become the dominant player in a given area, forcing local mom-and-pop grocers and regional chains to slash their costs or go out of business altogether. As a result, the local farmers, bakers, and manufacturers that once sold their goods to those now-vanished retailers are gradually replaced by Walmart’s array of national and international suppliers. (By some estimates, the company has historically sourced 60 to 80 percent of its goods from China alone.) As a result, Wiltshire finds, five years after Walmart enters a given county, total employment falls by about 3 percent, with most of the decline concentrated in “goods-producing establishments.”

Once Walmart has become the major employer in town, it ends up with what economists call “monopsony power” over workers. Just as monopoly describes a company that can afford to charge exorbitant prices because it lacks any real competition, monopsony describes a company that can afford to pay low wages because workers have so few alternatives. This helps explain why Walmart has consistently paid lower wages than its competitors, such as Target and Costco, as well as regional grocers such as Safeway. “So much about Walmart contradicts the perfectly competitive market model we teach in Econ 101,” Wiltshire told me. “It’s hard to think of a clearer example of an employer using its power over workers to suppress wages.”

Walmart’s size also gives it power over the producers who supply it with goods. . . . 

Walmart does not use its power wisely.

Back to the theme of time passing, here's a word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Dystoria

n. a feeling of irrelevance from the broader forces of history; the sense that your life has no relationship to any great mission, no generational hardship, not even an enemy—feeling as harmless as a droplet skittering down a window, that could’ve just as easily taken part in a tidal wave.

Latin dys-, bad + historia, history. Pronounced “dis-toh-ree-uh.”

And, to conclude, the final paragraph of that book's concept of Nodus Tollens (The Sense That Your Life Doesn’t Fit Into a Story).

As you thumb through the years, you may never know where this all is going. The only thing you know is that there’s more to the story. That soon enough you’ll flip back to this day looking for clues of what was to come, rereading all the chapters you tried to skim through to get to the good parts —only to learn that all along, you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

There's more to the story.

Invocation for a New Year

May you

be enchanted by life.

May you . . . 

wonder,

wander,

ponder;

Lose your sense of self

through connection

to your surroundings,

large and small,

distant and immediate,

personal and natural,

Feel awe every day;

Marvel in the ordinary;

Connect to the rhythms

of the cycles of

waking and sleeping,

lightness and darkness,

warmth and cold,

growth and decay,

activity and recovery,

productivity and rejuvenation;

Find your cycles are spirals,

each revolution through the familiar

providing new perspectives,

deeper truths,

added insights,

accumulated layers and lessons and practices;

Lightly embrace the inevitability of

sadness and illness,

weakness and weariness,

anger and frustration,

guilt and embarrassment,

as ephemeral and temporary;

Boldly embrace finitude and powerlessness,

nonsense and ignorance,

the power of not knowing,

the awesome mysteriousness of it all;

Look for the good

in yourself,

in others,

in everything;

Know you are connected,

interconnected,

woven into the web,

reciprocal,

defined by mutuality;

Seek to learn,

understand,

change,

grow,

improve what you can,

know that helping others helps you;

Be equally helped and loved in return

in positive spiraling cycles;

Tell stories that

make the world better,

that

create belief in a better world;

Be curious,

Be silly,

Be adventurous,

Be empathetic,

Be accepting,

Be wise,

Be one,

Be embedded in existence.