test blog #10

Wishing you all a happy, healthy 2021. Peace, love, and vaccinations! Click here to open the card . PS: This is my new favourite e-card site. I will post about them soon.

I recently completed three booklists for library customers, part of a system-wide readers' advisory project. The lists use good gender balance, and a strong representation of people of colour and LGBT themes. I did classics , award-winning nonfiction , and essay collections . I love readers' advisory, and I really enjoyed the challenge of writing about each title in about 45 words. In the list of essay collections, I included Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me . Then I decided it was time to read it! She's a brilliant essayist, one of the best I've ever read, and an important feminist voice. This slim collection packs an enormous punch. Reading Solnit's  now-famous piece about mansplaining made me think of another, related phenomenon. Both my partner and I have noticed this in discussions online, in a context where the commenters are mostly male. Here's how it goes. A man comments.  Many people disagree with him, including me. The man attacks me. Onl...

Like many writers, especially those of us who grew up before the digital age, I keep a notebook. I use it to capture ideas, capture thoughts about I'm reading, take notes on experiences, and take notes on various activist or community meetings I attend.  I've learned that I have to make notes while I'm thinking of something, because I am unlikely to remember the thought at another time, out of context. Before the digital age, I carried a small spiral memo pad with me almost all the time.  These days, however, I don't always have a notebook with me, so I do whatever is quickest -- type a note on my phone, scribble it on a scrap of paper, save an email in drafts, or email myself from one address to another. Later on, when I'm blogging, I check my notebook to see my notes. But I don't look at the notes on my phone or the scraps of paper sitting in a neat pile on my desk or any other form of notetaking. My note-capturing process has changed, but my writing process ...

Here we are in the middle of a global pandemic, and I feel (to paraphrase my favourite baseball player ) like the luckiest person on the face of the earth.* I'm healthy, my partner is healthy, and no one in our extended families has gotten covid. Thanks to my union, and to my partner's very decent employer, we have a comfortable income, and we didn't lose any income during the pandemic. I have a safe, comfortable, spacious place to ride out the lockdown and the pandemic in general, with plenty of indoor interests to keep me busy.  I live in an area with very low covid incidence, where it's easy to enjoy the outdoors while maintaining social distancing. And that's just my covid-related good fortune. In general my privilege is vast. My young life had many challenges, and perhaps my future holds more (who knows), but in the present I am incredibly fortunate.  I hope many of you reading this also enjoy lives of privilege, and that you have strong support for the areas o...