Books

 I'm not very good at this blogging every day thing. But as long as we're here:

Every once in a while I have an acquaintance who does not read books. They're capable of it, of course, but they just don't do it for whatever reason. Sometimes though they pick up a book and it is an amazing experience for them in the way that literature is an almost continuously amazing experience for those of us who do read. The non-readers want to share that experience with someone (and usually they are surrounded by people who don't read because birds of a feather and all that), so they bring the book to me. I don't know how they know that I like to read. I don't talk about books to non-readers, really, and I don't think I mention books more often in conversation than the average person. (Do I?) Over the years, non-readers bringing me books has meant that I've read a lot of stuff that I probably would never have picked up on my own: I've read Harlequin romances. I've read true crime books. I've read Neil Gaiman novels. It's how a Japanese student of mine introduced me to Haruki Murakami, who has since become one of my favorite writers.  I always read the books I'm given and always prompt a conversation about it when I return the book. So then this won't seem so strange:

My dental hygienist brought a book for me to my last appointment. For some reason, the first time she cleaned my teeth, we started talking about what are referred to as health inequities (she had taken a required class for her certificate that introduced her to this idea), meaning the unfairness that exists in healthcare as a result of many things, prejudices and income inequality and education levels and so on. She brought up a book that she had read in the class, a book that I knew about and talked about with a friend who had read it, but which I had never read because it sounded depressing as hell. The hygienist was shocked that I had heard about it even and could talk about it with her but that I hadn't read it. She immediately said, "I'll bring it for you at your next appointment. Don't buy it. I'll bring it for you." 

She forgot at our next appointment but swore she wouldn't forget again. And sure enough, she had it this last time. ("I hate it when I forget stuff like that, so I brought it and it's been in my locker for the last three months.") As I was leaving, she said, "Now we'll have something to talk about at your next appointment."

I'm only about fifteen pages into the book--The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman--and it is amazing. I can already tell that it is going to be horrible at some point (I remember from an interview that I read with the author over twenty years ago, that the subject of the book, a little Hmong girl, dies) but it is so well written that it pulls you along into it.

I took a break from it yesterday to read a novella--Alice Oseman's This Winter--that arrived from Amazon in the afternoon and I was done with that in a scant handful of hours. This Winter is part of the Nick and Charlie story, the two characters that Heartstopper centers around and it is a quick read. (Too quick for an eleven dollar book, I thought.) The main character, Charlie, is a fifteen-year-old boy with an eating disorder (anorexia) who engages in a non-specified type of self-harming (likely cutting). He is also anxious and likely depressed. When the story begins on Christmas day, Charlie has come home from an inpatient psychiatric facility specializing in eating disorders and he is having limited success with dealing with the stresses of the holiday. When the stress becomes overwhelming, Charlie seeks comfort in his sixteen (or maybe seventeen)-year-old boyfriend Nick. (I'm not sure how to feel about one teenager being put into the role of primary caretaker to another teenager with a mental illness, but I don't think it's that uncommon in reality.)

The Heartstopper series has been interesting to me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I worked with teenagers like Charlie (and his sixteen-year-old sister Tori who is also chronically depressed). I had patients with eating disorders, who self harmed, who were suicidal, depressed, anxious. I had patients who came from backgrounds of abuse and neglect. I had patients who were struggling with the realities of an LGBTQ+ existence, who were being bullied and who had no family or community to turn to. All of those topics (with the possible exception of depression) were largely absent from the young adult literature that I had access to as a child and teen (and trust me, I read a lot as a child and I would have come across it). We were lucky to get Judy Blume and Paul Zindel and perhaps J.D. Salinger. I don't recall any openly LGBTQ+ characters in any of the books I read. So it is amazing to come across those things now and I'm fascinated with how it's handled in Oseman's books and how those books are received by the world at large. 

Don't you love books? I have been listening to a lot of stand up comedy as I do artsy and craftsy type things and one of the comedians, Helen Hong, has a joke along the lines of: "During the pandemic, I learned that literally nothing on earth could get me to read a book." I get it and it's funny, yes, but also I don't get it. I don't get people who don't read. Books save lives, people. I'm living proof.

What else has been going on?

Let's see. I started using a vitamin C serum (Cerave Skin Renewing Vitamin C serum) and it's the one skin care thing that I have done in the last 20 years that I think makes a difference. There are a lot of vitamin C serums out there, but Cerave had the ingredients list that I thought would be unlikely to cause my extremely sensitive skin to go insane and I was right. It's been fine. Along those lines, I've also been using a new tinted sunscreen from Neutrogena that thankfully has not caused my skin to go crazy. (I normally use either Blue Lizard sensitive skin sunscreen or a sunscreen from Japan formulated for newborn babies called something like Pigeon Milk, two of the very few sunscreens that work for me because lord knows I've tried so many--so very many--susncreens that claim that they are made for sensitive skin and almost as soon as I put them on, I am bright red and itchy.)

What else? Therapy. The first season of The White Lotus. Oh and some kind of stomach thing that had me half convinced that I either had food poisoning or some kind of bezoar (don't google that one). And...following the advice from my friend Grace to make some kind of offering to the house spirits that are impishly moving stuff--quilting rulers, mirrors, electronic things--around and making things disappear and (sometimes) reappear around the house. 

I swear, if we live in a haunted house, I'm going to be pissed.