Buying American for the Holidays

"If each one of us spent $64 a year on something actually made in America, we would together create 200,000 jobs." -Diane Sawyer, ABC News.

This is the fourth year in a row that I've committed to buying products made in the USA for everyone on my Christmas list. It isn't easy and I'm lucky my list is pretty short. Besides my boyfriend, I only give gifts to children.

This year was easier than past years because I didn't waste much time looking for stores that simply don't exist. For a wide selection of reasonably priced kid toys, go to fatbraintoys. com and select American made in the search criteria. For adorable, one-of-a-kind, hand-made children's clothes, go to etsy.com. 

I am not trying to encourage a boycott of foreign products; I just think if I want to help American workers stay relevant, I have to be willing to put my money where my mouth is.

The Spirit of Christmas - Skipping the Gifts

For several years now, my family has decided to donate to charity in lieu of gifts to each other. We have given to Unicef, Heifer, CharityWater, to name a few. Helping someone on the other side of the world to become self-reliant feels better to me than receiving a bunch of things I really don't need. (And it saves on standing in the exchange line on December 26th.) It's much more consistent with the Christmas spirit.

Last year, I chose OxFam and I was able to donate a cow, which is, admit it, just fun. If you donate to them today, they are matching donations until midnight (for Cyber Monday). You can donate a well for $175 or a duck for $30. I think I'm going to give a school meal program for one child. If I donate today, that's two kids

I never donate to charity without checking with Charitynavigator.org. I will likely give the bulk of my donation to CharityWater, which is scoring higher this year. Program expenses get 84% of their budget and the CEO makes $192,000. (I can't stand charity CEOs who make millions.) I recommend checking out your charity here before donating. You can even look at their list of top-rated charities if you need ideas.

Book Review: The State of Me

Nasim Marie Jafry's debut novel reads more like memoir, depicting a fifteen year period in the life a woman diagnosed with ME, a condition which also affects the author. Diagnosed in the '80s, Helen Fleet must deal with a medical community that knows so little about her condition that it's often dismissed as psychosomatic. While this book does a good job challenging that idea, it didn't feel bogged down with medical information.

The novel is anything but plot driven. About a hundred pages in, I read some reviews to see if I should keep going. The consensus was yes, and I'm glad I did, but part of what impressed me the most about this book is that there's really no conventional plot to be found in 500 pages.

What kept me reading was the quirky perspective of the narrator. She is whiny and irritating at times (especially in the beginning when she's in her early twenties), but her take on the world in which she participates differently is revealing. She discusses the way her illness affects life's practicalities- going to parties, holding a job, traveling, living on her own.

Surprisingly, the narrative is dominated by her insecurities about her dating life. In some ways, this is frustrating, but it's also rather humanizing. The expectation for many readers would be for her thoughts to be consumed by her disease, but instead she obsesses over whether a particular boy will call her.

The book is unconventional stylistically. She shifts tenses and POV (by scene, not within a scene). There are "interviews" included where Helen answers the questions of a stranger, reminiscent of the ignorance she encounters about ME. As the perspective moves closer, then further away, it seems to mimic her own experience; at times she feels she's watching herself from the outside.

I think Jafry does a really good job of showing someone who is struggling with disability, but not defined by it. So many other things are bigger, most especially her unique personality. I think we live in a society that often forgets that's true of everyone.

The upside to having your email hacked

Okay, so first of all, let me apologize to anyone who was in my address book who got a strange, spammy email from my address. I've seen this happen to other people but this is the first time I've been hacked. So, in a way, that's kind of lucky. Is that Pollyanna enough for you?  No? Well, keep reading.

I've had the same email address since I was seventeen, so my address book is full of people I have lost touch with for one reason or another. So although my morning began with my boyfriend notifying me of the hack (followed quickly by my dad and brother), other emails began to pour in from across the country, people I haven't heard from in years.

I've spent the day touching base with people who were surprised but happy to hear from me. A professor from college, the copy editor for my first novel, the handyman who worked for me several houses ago. It's been a lovely trip down memory lane.

As much as the internet gets blamed for making us more isolated, sometimes it does the opposite. Hackers: bringing people together. Who knew?

So again, sorry for the spam and don't click the link!

Book Review: Ithaca

In Susan Fish's new novel, a woman who has let herself be defined by her family life is suddenly widowed and is forced to learn a new way to live. When Daisy's geologist professor husband drops dead of a heart attack she feels like her solid, sedentary life has been fracked. The spring of his passing also marks a change in her community. Anti-fracking signs appear on the roadside and Daisy finds herself wondering about them.

Where once Daisy kept herself apart, even in the weekly suppers she hosted while her husband was alive, now she feels the urge to participate. She begins to take a class to learn about fracking. Along the way she meets new people and is exposed to new ideas. She keeps hosting the Wednesday dinners, but becomes involved in them instead of watching from the outside. She begins to find her voice.

The story is quiet and sometimes slow, but Fish's portrayal of human emotion is incredibly complex and perceptive. The secondary characters are so well drawn. One is a young single mother with a struggling family farm. One is a retired professor who rents a room and confesses to having given up a child when she was young. One is a man whose wife has MS and the two of them become close. The way they become close and how close they become has as much to do with her back-story as his. Her new ability to be close to people now that her husband is gone is the main story- but the people she gets close to have complicated, real lives. They don't seem to exist just to help tell Daisy's story. You can imagine they go home and live real lives without her.

Ultimately, this is not a book meant to educate you on fracking or tell you what to think about it. It is more about how Daisy learns to engage with her community, to find her own way to contribute and recognize her value. At first, she dismisses herself as too old, uneducated, just a housewife. But she comes to see her gift of bringing people together and getting them to tell their stories. She learns to balance the parts of her old life with her new desires.

The resolution of the story is a bit open-ended (like life) and felt very true to the character. I enjoyed the read.

Movie Review: Gone Girl

I don't usually review movies, but since I reviewed the book yesterday and said I'd be seeing the movie, I'm making an exception.

Often, when I love a book, the movie can be a disappointment. It's really hard to tell the same story from an external point of view when it was originally internal. The screenplay was written by the same author who wrote the novel and - as a writer - I was blown away that she was able to tell this story so well in both mediums.

There are a few minor changes to condense the story, but fans of the book will find all the things that were great about the read have been translated into the film. We watched the movie with a couple who hadn't read the book and they enjoyed it too.

Book Review: Gone Girl

This is a difficult book to review without giving anything away. It's about a marriage that has begun to fall apart when the wife goes missing. Did the husband do it?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It's told in alternating narrative and both main characters are writers. It's so well-written with such intricate details and insight into relationships between men and women and real characters with inside jokes. Halfway through the book, I was already looking forward to rereading it, and by Part Two I had forced my boyfriend to start reading it. He got custody of the book when I fell asleep and stayed up until 2am to finish it.

Gone Girl is clever, fun, edge of your seat reading. Tonight, we're going to see the movie and can't imagine how they'll translate it for the screen.