l'astronave: January 2020

Thursday, January 30, 2020

Butter-Yellow Shoes & Moon River

My thrift store Instagram round up.

Top Row, Left to Right

1. Vox Humana reed stop on a pump organ

2. Those butter-yellow shoes are my favorite! "Socialites" brand, from the early The Mary Tyler Moore Show era (1970), I think.
Mary Richards, the show's main character, lived in Minneapolis, you know, and the shoes have a sticker from Dayton's, the big department store downtown featured in the show's opening (it's where she throws her hat in the air).

3. I don't care about the Cabbage Patch doll---the toy lady asked me to post it, with its adoption papers.

Bottom Row

4. Handmade bookmark for a manga, Soul Eater, found in a fantasy book. I usually save the interesting ephemera I find in books.

5. Heh. I set this up for Art Sparker, who recommends Ernest Becker's Denial of Death. We get lots of books about happiness--feels sort of frenetic.

6. The best thing about this 1965 Man from U.N.C.L.E. is that the owner cut out the order form on the last page, thus removing the text on the back, which describes a seduction scene.
So she (I assume it's a she) copied out the paragraphs onto the inside back cover:

"Solo selected a Henry Mancini LP and placed it on the turntable. Slowly it began to give (?) softly with MOON RIVER."

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

"Perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands..."

Two Writers' Hands

On page 2 of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards:

"Her hands were slender, her fingers short and sturdy, and she bit her bottom lip lightly, intently, as she read."

I could not stand to keep reading a book with such nonsensical and/or clichéd descriptions. I flipped 398 pages to the last page.
Here's the next-to-last sentence:

"Paul noticed how short and clipped her fingernails were, how delicate her hands looked ..."

Yep. I put it down.

Then I picked up Fahrenheit 451. On the third page, I read:

"The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. He had felt that a moment prior to his making the turn someone had been there.
. . . Perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant."

I have never read such a description (except when I read this book in high school, which I don't remember). Walking into the ghost heat of a person. And the character is a fireman.

I will follow you to the end of this book, Ray Bradbury.

Monday, January 27, 2020

Movie Round Up

I'm substitute-cashiering today for a sick coworker. I'm happy to stay in touch with the customers and the front-end, but I haven't cashiered in about three months and am not sure I remember all the register buttons...
Luckily it's not like Goodwill where the management is breathing down your neck. If I mess up, it's no big deal.

I've gone to see a few films lately--I'll do a quick write up...
[Whoops--turns out I only had time to write about two before going to take the bus.]

1917

Reviewers who rave about how visually unique it is ––(it's like one long, ongoing shot)––have never watched a first-person-shooter video game.

You follow the hero (likable) as he traverses a war-torn landscape [like in a video game, things pop out at him, he goes through doors and openings and down tunnels and finds stuff] on a mission to reach a battalion by daylight, or the soldiers will be slaughtered in battle.

Not bad, but predictable. If you are young and haven't seen any war movies (Gallipoli, or Saving Private Ryan), it's a decent one.

I hated the Hollywood soundtrack--it lessens the impact. Makes it seem even fakier. (The filming is realistic, but still, I felt it was made up. Based on real events, but, you know, Hollywoodified. )

Harriet

Ditto the standard orchestral movie soundtrack. (Except when Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" bursts forth--making me wonder if that was the only original music they could afford.)

Hollywood scores are emotionally manipulative, and the story here is so strong: the movie could have (should have, I think) relied on ambient sound, including the characters singing, which they do--Go Down Moses, Wade in the Water, etc.

I went because I'd heard the actor who plays Harriet Tubman-- Cynthia Erivo-- was terrific. She was. Not, it turns out, unexpectedly though: her background is in theater--she won a Tony for playing Celie in The Color Purple on Broadway.

Anyway, even though it's a standard Hollywood fare, it's an astonishing story, and not one I’ve seen a hundred times, unlike the nice-boy-in-a-hellscape). I'm glad I saw it.
Recommended for that, not for the movie-making.

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Best Practices: Leafy Greens & Truth

This evening I cooked up a whole lot of wilted old kale. In years past, I'd have thrown it out, but I've been influenced by the "eat ugly food" movement [was it Anthony Bourdain who popularized that?]. I did compost the yellow leaves, but I washed the rest in a sinkful of cold water several times and boiled it up.

I'm now eating the simple bean soup I made with it, and it's good.

Mz says she puts Best Practices into action when she's feeling out of balance. BPs include eating good food.
I definitely could use more good food.

I've been out of balance for the last two-and-a-half weeks since starting the store's Instagram. I've been tipped a bit toward Frenetic... though mostly in a happy way, and for a good reason--I've wanted to create a good IG that I like, and have fun doing it.
And I have.
We reached cruising altitude yesterday: 100 followers! Now I can relax a bit.
AND EAT REAL FOOD.

Every so often I post here about trying to eat better.
And then a while later, I post about it again.
In between, at least in the last couple years, my kale melts to sludge in the crisper drawer as I slowly slide into a diet of bakery items (donated to the store) that have a one-week "freshness" date, .
No baked item should be considered "fresh" after a day.

So. Up and at 'em again, Fresca:
Best Leafy-Greens Foot Forward!

OK, then.

As for relaxing about IG, though--not today.
bink and I had coffee this morning, on my day off, and she thought it would be fun to come to the store and help me photograph things to post.

It was fun!
She photographed the neckties, below left;
and I photographed my coworker shoveling the sidewalk, carbon-free (because we have no snow blower), center.
The shark-sweater shot was a collaboration:
it was bink's idea to have the shark go for little animals. I found the rubber duckies.

After we finished shooting the shark, before I could hang the sweater back up, someone came along and bought it.

I suppose the point of the IG is to market things--but it's also to "market" what we, SVdP, care about, which is not to make money for the sake of money.
(Which is good, because we don't make much of it.)

It's easier to photograph things than ideas, so the IG is more about "reduce reuse recycle" than "feed the hungry".
The mission statement says we're "a network of friends... building a more just world."

I don't know that we're building that, feels more like we're trying to keep the house from falling down...
And if we made more money we could pay a living wage and better support our food bank, which operates on a budget of the coins we find in the couch cushions. (Almost the truth.)

Still, I DO have conversations, regularly, with staff and customers about what's true and what's right.
As impeachment manager Adam Schiff says,

"Right matters. And the truth matters."

(Thank you, Orange Crate Art (OCA), for posting the clip of Schiff's closing statement.)

Yes. So, it's interesting. I'll keep trying to figure out best practices for IG... More living food, less dead stuff disguised by preservatives.

Oh, wow! After I posted this, I went back to OCA and clicked on a link on Jim Lehrer's ~~best practices~~ journalistic guidelines.
A lot of them are good guides for me now, as I think about IG, which is a kind of public journalism.

Number 1:

"Do nothing I cannot defend."

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Socializing, with Clowns

I. Social Media

I spent my day-off today online, puttering around with social media for the store. Now the new IG is up and running, www.instagram.com/svdpmpls
and FB is purring along as smoothly as ever, I reactivated our dormant Twitter account.

Maybe this'll change when I've been "svdpmpls" on all three sites longer, but the way I see it now, Facebook is for locals and "friends"--it always feels like a relative might read what you wrote;
IG is for pictures and younger people (under forty-five) (and people who stage their photos);
and on Twitter you can talk about politics and ideas with strangers from all over.

After 40+ posts and almost 90 followers in two weeks, yesterday I introduced myself on our IG.
I took the selfie in front of a mirrored mural of La Mexicana Grocery, where I wait for the bus going home.

This work is pretty much all I've been doing and thinking about. It's fun, and interesting, . . . though in the end it's just more of us humans.

Reminds me of a Catholic priest I knew who took a leave from the priesthood after fifteen years, hoping to fall in love and make a life with someone.
Four years later, he returned to the priesthood.

I've always remembered what he said about the reality of romance:

"I thought it would be like a Broadway show, but in the end, it was just another person."

Ha! Social media's like that too.
One might think it would be shinier people saying and doing better (or, possibly, worse) things, but it's just more people saying and doing the things people do, amplified.

Not much glamor to it, really.
Dave Barry was right (was it Dave Barry? now I can't find the quote)--the Internet is like CB radio, with typing.

Still, I like social media pretty well. Obviously, since I love blogging, it's more of the sort of thing I would like-- to generate and share pictures and words.

I'm not keen on the technical side of it (one reason I've been slower than I might be), but these sites want people of all abilities to use them, and they do make it awfully easy.
I've only had a few glitches I couldn't figure out--mostly from things I don't know about my phone, I think.

I was telling a friend that after I get this nonprofit's social media up and running, I could make a lot of money being a Social Media Manager.
I probably could even do that now.
But I can't imagine doing this work for a business I didn't love. It's so intimate, it'd be like blogging for someone else.

(Also I revile the "talk cute" jargon of social media marketing. It's evil fakery, and embarrassingly see-through at that. It's like when adults who don't like children talk to children as if they do. Ick, ick, ick. No.)

Of course I wrote nonfiction books on assignment for a publisher I didn't love, but in fact I did love each of the topics I wrote about––I turned down topics I wasn't interested in––and I did love that the books were going be read by teenagers.

What I love most is having a reason to delve deeper into things--and then to talk about what I discover.

II. Send in the Clowns

A couple days ago, the volunteer who sorts artwork showed me a framed lithograph, a signed artist's proof that'd been donated (from someone's estate) to the store this week.
He, the volunteer, had looked up the artist––Wayne Howell–– and hadn't found much, just a couple of WH's prints listed on ebay for a couple hundred dollars. He'd priced ours at $99 and wanted me to photograph it and post it on FB, to attract possible buyers.

I wasn't very interested---partly because it's a pain to photograph anything under glass and avoid getting glare--and also the print was unappealing---a crying clown on the witness stand in front of a judge & jury.
What?

But this morning it all of a sudden struck me:
A clown on trial, with a clown jury?
How perfect for this week of the Senate's impeachment trial of Trump!

Before I posted it on Instagram, I googled the artist. Like our volunteer, I didn't find much. Then I checked the IG hashtag #waynehowell. There were only 4 images---and one was a companion piece to ours!

No information, but...

CRAZY WILD---it's about Watergate!!! I can't believe how perfectly that lined up!

Recognize the puppets and puppet masters?

I don't get the top puppeteer---"Kong Power". Do you?

I see Pinocchio, Charlie McCarthy, Henry Kissinger, [don't know], Nixon, Howdy Doody, and Ollie, Kukla, and ________[that's not Fran. Who is it? Nixon himself?].

Anyway, then I posted both images, and I left a message for the person who'd posted the 2nd one, and we had a small chat. Neat! That made me happy.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Outfit of the Day #OOTD

And... on a more frivolous note, I am figuring out how to photograph clothes for the store's social media.
www.instagram.com/svdpmpls

I don't care much about clothes, but it's fun to put colors and shapes together.

Gagging with superfluity

On Martin Luther King Jr Day yesterday, for the store's social media I wanted to emphasize that MLK message was about waaaay more than "let's play nice & fair"*, which is how he's often portrayed.

MLK was not "nice" about it. He wrote,
"The contemporary tendency in our society is ... to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.
If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity.""

And, further, I wanted to point out that the Society of St Vincent itself calls for change far more radical than supplying clothes and food. The founder of the Society, Frederic Ozanam, wrote,
"I condemn... the exploitation of all for the good of the few."**

I made this macro and wrote out the quotes. It got far fewer "likes" on our FB than the "you are a good white person because you give to charity" kind of quotes do.

*Re Niceness: An article in the Guardian:
"White people assume niceness is the answer to racial inequality. It's not" by Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility.

**Ozanam quote from "Faith Charity Justice and Civic Learning, the Lessons and Legacy of Frederic Ozanam"
https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1364&context=vhj

Who's Monstrous?

I unpacked a batch of donated old books about deafness at the thrift store yesterday. They had a creepy vibe.

A professor friend who is deaf writes about the social history of deafness, as well as recently publishing her first personal creative- nonfiction on the subject:
"Being Seen Deaf, or, Pools as Borders".

I texted her photos of the books, saying their covers and titles such as They Grow in Silence reminded me of sci-fi horror books . . . about plants:
Day of the Triffids (plants with poison tendrils) meets the Midwich Cuckoos (alien children).

Yes, she wrote back, deafness has been (and is) considered "monstrous, 'worse than blindness', whatever that means."

Deafness, as I understand it through friends in deaf culture, is kind of like race:
the unquestioned social norm is that a Person is "hearing" and "white". Attempts to mimic or conform to the norm may involve a monstrous warping.

The books reminded me of presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump mocking Joe Biden's stutter. Sure enough, there was a book on stuttering in this stack too.
What a monstrous crew we have in the White House...

"The Marvelous Toy"

We're having a mild winter, but Saturday was wicked cold.
The new girlette, Five, and Pensive Bear went to our library one block away. It's a restored old Carnegie library--one of my favorite things in the neighborhood.

Pensive Bear had been feeling sad that she didn't have a proper Orphan Red dress (even though most don't wear them, the plaid dress is the girlette's official garb), so the others gave her one, and a hair ribbon.

The girlettes pulled out Snow Sisters but ended up on the windowseat reading The Marvelous Toy.

As I was lying on the floor taking their photos, the librarian came by and said,
"Thank you for using our library this way," and she invited me to post photos on their mostly inactive Instagram!

Funny little local detail--in the top photo, below, there's what looks like a white crystal on the floor, by Five's foot.
If you live in a snowy climate, you'll probably recognize it:
It's a piece of rock salt, which the library (and lots of people) spread on their winter sidewalks to melt ice and provide grip.
People track bits of salt and sand inside on their boots all winter long.

Friday, January 17, 2020

Firebird!

Yesterday was Costuming Day.

L to R: The Firebird (SweePo), by bink;
Prince Mir, by me; and Princess Penny Cooper, by sister

The Firebird flies.

Shots by bink of Dress Rehearsal, below:

There was a frenzy of paparazzi!

Orphan Reds' costumes were inspired by Leon Bakst's designs for Sergei Diaghilev's 1910 production by the Ballets Russes of Stravinksy's Firebird:

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Content Is Fragile

Predicatably, I've been out of balance since starting the store's Instagram a week ago (instagram.com/svdpmpls). I've been posting 3x/day to build up a new account, and that's good.
I've also been checking-in constantly.
I am becoming annoying to myself.

The thing is, it's super fun to create content, as they say--to plan and take photos to post. It gives me permission to talk to people and play with stuff, which I love to do.

This morning I took photos of Mr Furniture (far left) and his crew as they were setting up bed frames. (You can see some of my BOOK's in the background too.)
I asked all the guys if it was OK if I used their photos, and they all said yes.

I always want to show the Store in Action/Behind the Scenes.
But besides that, my posts had been looking awfully much like Stuff White People Like (remember that blog? geez--it's been gone nine years already...), including––ha!––I posted a picture of the book White Fragility (2018, by sociologist Robin DiAngelo). It got donated yesterday, and I took it home and skimmed through it.

The most recent posts are first up. You can see that black people make an appearance after I read White Fragility.

There's a good review of White Fragility in The New Yorker. (TNY--how white can you get? :)

But, Who's Hurt Here?

I've mentioned Mr New Cashier. He's the white guy who was upset because, he told me, among other things, even though HE IS NICE TO THEM, people of color do not necessarily treat him, and I quote, "with common human decency."

I had some initial sympathy:
It is stressful to have someone o.d. in the parking lot next to your car on your second day of work. An overreaction that includes a confession of confusion about race is to be taken with a grain of salt.

But you didn't mean all those things you said, Mr Cashier, did you?

Uh-oh. Turns out, you do.

Mr Cashier's been making signs for the store (he's an illustrator).
Most are great, but last week he messaged me his latest--it showed a pair of black kids looking a little scared, and also looking like they were from the Civil Rights era, like little Ruby Bridges in Norman Rockwell's painting.
The illustration was to advertise our store's Dollar Day. (???)

"What do you think?" he wrote.

"I'm baffled," I said. "They look scared."

He pushed back. "I want them to look like our customers. I want to show it's OK to be normal and looking for a deal."

WTF????
I was bending over backwards, I know, but I wondered, could I be getting this wrong?

To check, I showed one of our coworkers, a black guy.
"Looks like they're hiding from the KKK," Mr Coworker said. He also said it was OK if I texted that feedback to Mr Cashier.

"The KKK? That's a bit extreme," Mr Cashier responded. "I'm trying not to take this personally, but I don't see that at all."

A black guy tells you that a picture you made calls into mind the KKK, and it's your feelings that are hurt?

I hadn't read the book at the time, but the term "white fragility" popped into my mind.
Mr Cashier could be a poster child.

I get it that it's frightening to talk about race. I find it frightening too.
Basically, as author Robin DiAngelo spells out, the problem is that Nice Liberal White People (I'm one!) see anything that implies they are "racist" as an accusation that they are Not Nice.
Naturally we react in self-defense.

The problem is partly the word itself:
"racism", DiAngelo points out, is a system we live in, not an individual act one chooses to do. (That would be "discrimination", or a hate crime, etc.)
I'd come to that understanding myself.

The thing is, I as a white person may get my feelings hurt, but I AM NOT THE VICTIM HERE.

I saw the fear in the children Mr Casheir drew. I thought he was insensitive and was way off base, but the children's fear did not trigger my fear, the way it obviously triggered my coworker's fear (and anger!).

So, upon reflection, I felt a little "bad" (a little bit white-guilty) that I'd featured Donna Parkeron on Instagram before any of my coworkers, most of whom are people of color.

Feel bad about something you've done, or not done, to other people?
I'd say, get over yourself and do something else, if you can.
So I did.

I, you, we, whoever we are, get to like what we like.
My most recent post is a book illustrated by Edward Gorey. He's gotta be some stuff white people like. It's not on that blog, but Where the Wild Things Are is, which is pretty close.
Good stuff!

Saturday, January 11, 2020

The Girlette Away Team

I. The Away Team

Did I mention that three girlettes went to stay with HouseMate's five-year-old grandson after Christmas?

This little boy and his family had been staying here in the guest room. They live a couple hours away. I'd actually told this boy that he could have a doll or two for his very own––it was his suggestion that they'd just like to come visit.

Today his mother (HM's daughter) sent photos.
This one cracks me up so much; it touches me that the boy made a little structure for his visitors.

Jayne, Bubblepop, and Sparkle

II. Analytics. Not.

I did not take the dog out today. It was 10ºF, and I spent the entire day inside, except for taking the trash out, which convinced me it was a good day to stay inside. The dog didn't even ask to go for a walk, in fact. If he'd done the Let's-Go-For-a-Walk dance (unmistakable), I'd probably have succumbed. But he seemed happy enough hanging out on my bed while I was reading about and working on social media for the store.

(I'd asked Big Boss if I could put in hours at home, and he said yes. The crowded noisy conditions at the store are not conducive to thinking.)

Advice about social media management can be intimidating––"You must track analytics", etc.––but after a while I thought,
Eh, it's all variations on storytelling. People like pictures and stories about people.
I'll do that.

The new IG is coming along well enough. Forty followers in four days is acceptable.

I'm a little proud of myself, too, for putting together an outfit to post. Fashion is not my area of interest, but, again, it's all variations on a theme--it's like a collage in fabric. (Plus, I help the girlettes dress up.) I enjoyed it.

Funny how much you know about something you don't think you know about. Advertising works. Without having paid much attention to fashion, I could recognize the names of big brands considered desirable--at least by "my" people (middle class, middle-aged, etc.).

III. I am not everybody.

Work continually reminds me that this group--"my" people––is a small fraction of the whole.

The other day a regular customer pulled me aside and murmured, "Maybe you didn't look closely...", showing me that she'd turned around a book I'd placed on display.

It was this book's cover she found ...
well, she didn't say, but I gather she thought the nudity was not suitable for public viewing.

She was right:
I hadn't zoomed in on the offending region.

I'd just thought,
"Oh, Chagall," and didn't SEE the picture.

I'd probably have put it on display anyway, because the signifier for me wasn't the art, it was the artist.

So, it's kind of cool--this customer made me LOOK!

I told her, "Oh, I see. I'll move it to the art section."

And I did.

I got the feeling she thought I should have taken it entirely away.

IV. Where's the Line?

A few weeks ago someone else at the store told me I shouldn't have Bill O'Reilly's series of history books on the shelves, saying, "He's a vile man."
It can be a hard call--I'd have to take off a lot of books if I were judging on how their authors lived...

But the next day I decided to take off off O'Reilly's books.
I'd looked them up, and a reviewer compared their historical accuracy to The DaVinci Code (here). Ha! (Also, no one ever bought them.)
Oh dear. Does that sound bad? Like I care more about historical accuracy than rape?

No!

But ...hm... this is complicated, but yeah, I do judge a created-thing differently than I judge its creator.
A lot of books on the shelves--(and not works of genius, either)--were written by vile men. There are worse examples, but the man Dickens disgusts me. But I still love A Christmas Carol.

Still, O'Reilly is a different case--it's not so easy to separate the works from the life of a living man whose whose criminal behavior was considered "normal" until very recently (and still some people think it's not such a big deal). O'R's sexual abuse of women––serial rape––represents a whole class of behavior undergoing much needed scrutiny right this very moment.

If his books were absolutely brilliant?
Hm. You know... I'd put them out with a sign!
Leave room for people to write feedback.

But they are so very much not brilliant, it was easy to put them in recycling alongside the outdated Triple-A Guide to New Mexico, the nth copy of The Bridges of Madison County, and the mouse-chewed Gone with the Wind.
(I put out copies of GWTW even though it's so, so racist. Someone buys them.)

I went to see Bombshell the other day and was viscerally glad I'd taken O'R's books off. I hadn't paid close attention to revelations about the Fox rape culture (which the movie is about) because I barely knew who any of the people were.
Now I do.
It's a good movie too.
The best scene is the first 24 seconds of this trailer--Kate McKinnon (playing a fictional character) explaining the Fox pov:
"The world is a bad place, people are lazy morons...".

V. We're still here, eh?

I check the news more than usual these days. The more I hear about Harry and Meghan, the less anxious I am. A distraction, I know.

I also know it's culturally complex and everything--an avalanche of analytics!––but isn't it hilarious that the announcement that the younger son of an aging, would-be king, and the son's wife will be spending half the year in Canada is a BFD?

I hope I see you and continue to see you all soon !

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Inching Forward

Walk Together

My big news is, I took the dog for his daily walk this evening.
It was 11ºF (-12ºC), but I got up off the couch to take him out. We only went around a couple blocks, but it perked us both up.

Aren't I scintillating?

But it is interesting to me how much I'm enjoying these outings, and the dog himself--unexpectedly so.

The blue bit in the lower right corner is the handle of the retractable leash---I got it at the thrift store, and it makes the dog's walks much better.
He's such an EASY dog, compared to bink's terriers--the main dogs I've known over the past twenty years.

I suppose it's normal enough, but I'm surprised that I'm starting to have an independent relationship with the dog. He came and lay on my bed this afternoon while I was working in my room. Normally he stays on the couch in the living room where he can look out the window.

He's a mild dog--easily cowed--but he has his preferences...
He LOVES going for walks: his oxytocin or whatever happiness hormone kicks in is probably doing us both a lot of good and encouraging our bonding.
Huh.
I wrote that sort of facetiously, but I bet it's true!

Act Together, and Independently

The growing affection between me and the dog was especially welcome the last couple days, with the possibility of full-on war breaking out.
Hasn't it been terrifying and horrible?

We are already at war, of course--have been for most of this century so far--but it could always get worse, and it looked like it might. (Still could... But it seems to have been averted, for now, pleasegod.)

I felt it was important to say something about the situation on the store's FB & IG, since svdp is about justice and compassion specifically for people on the bottom rungs of society, and war hits there the hardest.

Because no one at my store has any ideas about social media, there are no guidelines for me to follow.
In the year and a half I've been doing our FB, no one has said a single substantive thing about my posts--just a very occasional "nice job".
I'm making it all up as I go along.

Today I figured it'd be best to use St. Vincent's voice, not something more pointedly political and of the moment.
Luckily the saint's big on works, not just "thoughts and prayers", and I found a suitable quote that could be interpreted many ways, but calls for thinking calmly––and doing something:

"Proceed quietly, pray a great deal, and act together."

A Vincentian commented that it was "especially appropriate today," and on my personal page a friend commented,
"'proceed quietly'---key words. From both U.S. and Iran leaders....no 'crowing'".
So I chose correctly.

I don't pray, but I do try to practice discernment, which is related and is also something Vincent taught. He was pretty smart about the practical difficulties of trying to be compassionate and work for justice. Like making peace--good intentions alone are far from enough.

I've posted nine photos on the store's new IG. Looking for ideas and guidance, I spent the afternoon looking at other thrift accounts. Mostly they aren't impressive. The Society on the whole isn't up on marketing...
It'd be more efficient if they were, but then I wouldn't get to play and experiment:
I would be implementing some national marketing plan. Or, rather, I wouldn't, because I would hate that.
So, once again, the inefficiency that makes me gnash my teeth also allows a lot of creative freedom.

I looked at hundreds of posts with the hashtag #thriftedbooks too, and got some good ideas for photography and presentation of books (and other objects). It seems to be mostly young people posting about reading--it's very heartening.

I often feel insecure because I don't know what I'm doing and I fear I'm doing it badly, but I think I can do this social media thing for the store. Like taking the dog for a walk, the bar to clear is pretty low.

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

The New IG

I set up an Instagram account for the thrift store, and now I have a headache. I'm just making this all up as I go along, you know...

The IG is going to be a little different than the FB page:
I aim to make it something that would be interesting even if you didn't live in town, so less "daily sale" notifications, more general-interest photos.

Monday, January 6, 2020

Dog Walk

I've walked HouseMate's dog four out of these first six days of 2020---so, not daily as I'd intended, but that's four more walks than he'd have gotten otherwise. He's extremely excited each time we go out, so that's gratifying for me.

Here's the dog at the lakeshore. There continue to be almost no people at the lake in the mornings, so I can let him off the leash.

Book & Darning-Needle Marks

It's almost 9 p.m. I don't usually blog at night, but I want to keep up with little things that happen during the days so I don't end up writing huge posts (. . . about odds-and-ends I could post about singly. Writing huge posts about ideas I'm trying to hash through is fine, of course--it helps me to think.)

So a quick post before bed.
I took a bunch of photos today, preparing to launch the store's IG---I intend the IG posts to to be artsier than the stuff I put on FB.

Here's an old, heavily used Catholic prayer book that's been repaired with tape. Its bound bookmark has come detached but is still in use.
I love signs of use like this.

And here's an old darning egg--it's smooth surface has been dinged by darning needles:

It's part of a stash of darning supplies inside an old tin made in England.

Sunday, January 5, 2020

"A Cigarette Lighter That Doesn't Work"

I went to see The Shop around the Corner (1940) at the nearby microcinema on Christmas Day with bink & Maura.
Have you seen it?

What a satisfying movie! Funny and smart, and even sort of subterraneously sexy. It's a romantic comedy of miscommunication between coworkers who like each other, . . . but the woman acts like she doesn't. The coworkers are played by Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan--they are really great together.

Meanwhile, unknowingly they are falling in love with each other through the anonymous exchange of letters.
I'm a little miffed I didn't know this movie is so good--it's set at Christmas and I'd have been watching it every year.

You've Got Mail is the 1998 remake. It's such a shame that Mail replaced the original unbelievable Macguffin (the basically unimportant explanation of why the woman acts as if she doesn't like the man) with such a clunker.

In the original, the young woman naively thinks being catty is a way women attract men's interest. (Barely believable--I can see why You've Got Mail replaced it.)
Mail's reason is believable, but it's terrible:
The woman (Meg Ryan) is attracted to the man (Tom Hanks), but she's mean to him because he's driving her indie bookstore out of business.
When the Mail couple finally realize they've fallen in love via email, you're left thinking, yeah, but Tom Hanks's character IS a jerk.
Jimmy Stewart's isn't. (Margaret Sullavan has acted like a jerk, but she acknowledges she was wrong, and it's not too late to right it.)

I had a couple days of misfiring communications myself. If I believed in astrology, I'd think some stars got their wires crossed. Conversations about things got blown weirdly way out of proportion.
A dear old friend and I almost broke up over... Danish socialism?
Really???
And HouseMate and I had a misunderstanding about. . . energy efficient light bulbs?
What?!

Luckily a couple intense, good conversations righted both connections.

Come to think of it, I had some easy and excellent connections too, including blog friend Kirsten sending the girlettes a box of fabric scraps and beads and other geegaws. They loved it! They will bring them to the Firebird costume design session with sister & bink in a couple weeks.

Here at a coffee shop, Minnie has wrapped herself in cut velvet and is sorting through a bag of beads.