Day 10 - Governor Newsom rescinds restrictions. Outdoor dining reinstated!

Excellent book…

2/3/21. Wednesday.

8:30 – 9:30 – Cramps.  I take two Advil and wait for it to kick in.  I listen to The Daily.

9:30-10:00 – Downstairs and I load my pillow and bolster pillow in the car.  The dog looks like she’s been up for hours and is playing with a tennis ball. Outside and she tries to chase some birds before finally going potty on the red rock.  I note that the dog vomited on the patio and the vomit is now dry.  Great. We return inside.  Cheese for her; coffee for me. I go upstairs and have coffee and Girl Scout cookies for breakfast.

10:00-12:00 – Blog post. I have some of L.’s butternut squash soup.

12:00-2:00 – I check personal email and emails from the Colleges, then send a stern email to the students (9) who did not take the Video Quiz at the end of class on Monday (the same thing I did for my Thursday class).  I inform them that they received a 0 on the Video Quiz and were also marked absent.

I read online news.

-The Coordinator for my DE class emails to say I can submit screen shots from College No. 1 in order to fulfill my assignments.  I have no idea how to do this.

-I  update January’s budget, expenditures, and my Excel spreadsheet.

2:00-4:00 – I finish Dancing.

This is an excellent read and I couldn’t put it down.

The book begins with the author recounting an incident where, at age 14, she was kidnapped and held for ransom by a black assailant who is only a few years older than the author. It is of interest that the author does not disclose her assailant’s race until the last quarter of the book. This is probably in light of our current, politically correct climate which, to some extent, I don’t fully understand. In another book that I recently read – I cannot recall the title – a second author used the same ‘device’, choosing not to say her attacker was black until the last 20 or 30 pages. If a memoirist is recounting facts involving an assault, what is wrong with providing the race of the perpetrator? Where is the racial bias in relaying a factual account of a terrible tragedy?

To continue, the perpetrator violently rapes the author and leaves her for dead in an industrial park in the middle of a Nebraskan ice storm. The victim is somehow able to walk to a nearby business where a female employee calls the police.

BUT, oddly enough, we find out that this horrific incident is NOT the source of the author’s ever-present anxiety and consistent disassociation (manifested in the form of seizures).  Rather, it is her MOTHER  who is portrayed as the worst perpetrator in the author’s life as she revisits incidents throughout the book of physical abuse and cruelty that her mother inflicted on the author and her three sisters, while her FATHER pretended the abuse wasn’t happening and did nothing to stop it.

As the author becomes an adult, marries, has children of her own, and undergoes extensive therapy, she reaches out to both of her parents, in the form of emails and letters, explaining the psychological trauma she endured, i.e., her mother’s abuse and her father’s complicity in the abuse.  Here’s the kicker…her parents write back!  Repeatedly. Every time they get a letter or email from the author.

Although the mother is self-absorbed and narcissistic and we, as the reader, know that she never truly “gets it”, she does try. Mom says she’s sorry and Dad admits he was remiss in allowing the abuse to continue.  Both parents start therapy and try to learn how they contributed to the author’s mental state, but the author rebuffs them at every turn, proclaiming that her parents are just not doing enough to atone for the trauma they inflicted on she and her three sisters. Mom sends $1000 worth of gifts to the author’s children for Xmas, but the author returns them, even after her kids have seen the gifts and are crying because they’re not allowed to open the presents. The author states that she and her parents are at an “impasse.” I really don’t know what more her parents could have done…

Eventually, at age 68, the author’s father kills himself by taking sleeping pills and then feeding a hose into the tailpipe of his car so he can die from carbon monoxide poisoning. In other words, it was intentional; however, he had recently been prescribed Prozac and sometimes suicidal ideations/suicides are associated with Prozac so I wonder if his suicide was a tragic side effect of the psychotropic medication he was taking.  In typical fashion, the author blames her father for his suicide, failing to see that extraneous circumstances may have played a factor. Meanwhile, her mother becomes deaf, old(er), and feeble and is largely estranged from the author and her children.

BUT even this incident in the last few pages of the book is NOT the end.  Yet another plot twist unfolds! If you read past the Acknowledgments – and most won’t – there are four lone pages of a transcribed interview that the author had with a reporter in the very back of the book.  In a small section of the 4-page transcription, the author reports that she started writing her memoir after her 14-year-old son was suddenly killed in a bicycle accident! There is no mention of this, whatsoever, in the entire book and the author discusses her two children frequently as if nothing is wrong.

This one piece of information is, sadly, the most tragic incident in the entire book and it is never revealed.  Of note is a sort of sick, circular legacy in that the author was raped and left for dead at age 14, but survived, while her son did die at age 14.

Dancing With the Octopus is heartbreaking.  Highly recommend.

4:00-4:30 – Straighten my closet.

4:30-5:45 – Spa Day. Blow dry hair. Light make-up. Covid-19 uniform.

5:45-6:10 – I make sure I have everything in my overnight bag.

6:10-6:30 – Drive to B.’s

6:30-7:30 – Cocktail hour! B. and I talk politics.

7:30-8:30 – Dinner is salad, baked salmon, and a baked potato.  Very good.

8:30-12:00 – B. and I finish The Flight Attendant series. If you go through life having never seen this show, you’re fine. We start watching a Dateline episode about a woman thrown overboard on a cruise, but decide to stop in the middle.

12:30 – Bed.