Reading Notes

I'm such a nerd that I still like to have a "summer reading project." Well, this year, I have to have a "spring reading project." See picture below.I've started or read already this whole stack, but I'm wanting to either wrap them up or reread them. I need to be done by Memorial Day, so I can start my summer reading project. See image below.Yes, this summer is going to be three months of some quality time with Jane. I haven't read them back-to-back like this since college, so we'll see how it goes.

*Note: I just realized that's quite a variety of content in the first stack: mythology, prostitution, Christianity, and witchcraft. I guess you could say I have very diverse tastes.

Who Do I Think I Am?

I am so into a TV show right now called “Who Do You Think You Are?” on NBC. It basically follows celebrities as they research their genealogies. So far, I’ve seen Sarah Jessica Parker, Emmett Smith, and Lisa Kudrow. Sarah Jessica discovered that she was related to someone who travelled to California during the gold rush and a woman who was accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials. Emmett Smith began his search in Pensacola, FL and traced his roots to a tiny town by the name of Burnt Corn, AL. He discovered there that his ancestors were slaves that were bought from a slave trader in Virginia. Lisa Kudrow’s great-grandmother was killed during the Holocaust in a village in what is now Belarus. During Lisa Kudrow’s episode I got very emotional. Seeing names of people who were massacred and seeing groups of people with the same last name….knowing this meant that these were entire families killed together. One of the women she talked to in the village lived there during that horrible time. She had hidden a little Jewish girl under her bed. We also recently watched a movie that depicted a farmer in the French countryside who, when faced with the threat of being killed, confessed that he was in fact hiding Jews under his house. Both of these scenarios really made me think.

What kind of person would I be if I were in their shoes…then? They say that hindsight’s 20/20, and when we look at history it’s usually so obvious what’s right and wrong. It certainly is in this situation…or in the case of slavery…or in the case of getting caught up in a frenzy that leads to the death of many innocent people. It’s also easy for me to not really grasp the fear that many of these people dealt with. I’m a white, Christian, American, English-speaking, fairly conformist young woman. I’m not usually lumped in with groups that have been persecuted in the past. So, given that knowledge, what if my neighbors were being rounded up and sent to a ghetto? What if my family owned slaves? Or, even more recently, what if I lived every day in a segregated society? I’d like to think that I would be brave enough to fight an institution and idea that I knew in my heart was wrong and evil. I’d like to think that I’d be willing to put my own life and safety on the line to defy that evil.

I’d like to think that, but sometimes, I’m so ashamed to admit, I think I’d be too scared.

That's How Mom Did It

(It's exactly halfway through March, and I have failed miserably at my goal of blogging more. Here's one to hopefully kick things off.)

I guess you could say that, for the most part, David and I have fallen into the traditional male-female roles in our relationship. I clean the house: he mows the yard. I do the laundry; he makes the necessary repairs to things around the house. I decide to hang pictures, and he dutifully follows me around with hammer in hand.

Most of my duties, I learned how to do from my mother. Growing up, I was lucky enough to have my own bathroom. My sisters shared a bathroom, and my parents had their own. We three girls were responsible for keeping our respective bathrooms clean. Mom taught us how to do this. She didn't expect us to do a lot of actual cooking, but we were expected to set the table, fix drinks, refill the ice trays, and then clean the kitchen up when supper was over. So, we were very present during the actual preparing of meals. As we each began to desire to learn how to cook and bake (mostly bake, we all have a sweet tooth) Mom was there to teach us the basics. I still tend to do things like my Mom always did.

However, nowhere do I feel that my experience of being "the lady of the house" is more different than my mother's than when I go to the grocery store. I use reusable grocery bags...something I'm sure my mother would have thought very strange when we were young. So, every time I go to the store, I have to make sure I didn't leave them sitting in one of the kitchen chairs the last time I went to the store. I have to guesstimate about how many bags I'm going to need...something my Mom NEVER had to think about. My Mom also never had to load her own groceries in her vehicle...at least not when we were very small. I guess that's another thing we can thank Wal-Mart for. When we got a Wal-Mart Supercenter they didn't do that...and people stopped expecting it. However, today I actually went to Publix instead of my normal Kroger, and it wasn't for just a couple of things. I had a case of water and three bags of groceries. The bag boy asked if I would like help out, and I know Publix will do this. My Kroger will do this, too. BUT...I wouldn't even know how to act while some stranger loaded my groceries into my car. When I was young, it was no big deal that some random boy was putting the groceries in our trunk. Mom could get us all loaded in the car and buckled up, but what would I do while he was loading up my car...sit in the front seat and return calls on my cell phone like some kind of duchess or something?

So, I really would have liked help out, adorable, freckled, 17-year old boy, but it was too awkward. Sorry.

For Liz