Hello everyone, hope you enjoyed and/or survived and/or noted with satisfaction the poignant discomforts of Thanksgiving.
I’ve been busy writing a handful of personal stuff.
Death Made Me Materialistic
This is a story about what I’ve learned from upgrading some of my possessions recently in an effort to make a hard time a bit easier.
I want to push back on the dominant narrative that stuff is necessarily unimportant.
(especially difficult to swallow when we’re all busy buying and consuming and presumably liking at least some of that - hella cognitive dissonance).
Does “Gratitude” Make Sense?
Gratitude practices are “evidence-based,” but I have a hard time with some tensions in the guiding concept. I’ve tried to arrive at a working theory of gratitude as more affective than cognitive.
My Path-Dependent Family
This is sort of a motherhood mini-memoir, sort of a confession, sort of a wedding anniversary commemoration.
If you are one of the handful of people from my distant past who wondered wtf changed about me in the past few years, My Path-Dependent Family is definitely for you, too.
📚 What I’m Reading:
Saudade: the untranslatable word for the presence of absence (Aeon) - The concept you didn’t know you needed if you’re celebrating the holidays with a loss on your heart.
Also, I’m a quarter of the way through Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. The chapters on deafness and dwarfs have already put to shame everything I thought I knew about those conditions (and I used to teach bioethics, even. How embarrassing). Will review eventually.
How do you approach New Years?
As I’m choosing end-of-year blog topics and moving through my own year-end stuff, I’d love to hear what you’re thinking and/or feeling about the new year.
Do you make resolutions? Do a year-end review? Something else? Nothing?
I’m honestly curious! I don’t bite, but I do reply to every message.
Hope your hangovers are all gone by now,
Pamela