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We had a party tonight watching The Lawrence Welk Show. Yes, that is what passes for a party at our house. America was a better place when variety shows like this were popular. I don’t really know that; I wasn’t alive when the show aired — or we didn’t have a TV at that time (it ran through the early 80s; I just checked). I can only imagine that our culture was better when the population appreciated brass bands, trained singing, full orchestras and, of course, polkas and similar played on an accordion.

I noticed that Mr. Welk had a distinguishable accent, not purely American, which made me curious, as I had thought he was born here. Well, he was, but it was to German immigrants who lived in a German-speaking community in North Dakota. He, in fact, didn’t speak English until he was an adult. There used to be many of these communities in the US; if our country had chosen an official language at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, it might have been German. As it went, we never did choose an official language. English simply became the default, probably because it was the language originally used in federal government bodies and documents. For the record, though, all the hoity-toity English-only types who put their noses in the air and claim that early immigrants went out of their way to be ‘Murican and learn English aren’t exactly correct.

I found Welk’s biography curious. He was from a farm family who started out their lives in North Dakota living in an upturned wagon — those were the kinds of hardships Americans used to face. Welk was the sixth of eight children, and despite the hardships, Welk asked his father to buy him a $400 accordion. His father bought it for him and expected him to work it off on the farm. And like a good young man, he did just that. But I want you to put that price into perspective. Four-hundred dollars a hundred years ago is comparable to five-thousand in our day. That’s a lot of money for farmers. Did you know the accordion I would like to buy would cost me approximately $5000? That means quality accordions have maintained their value according to inflation. I currently own a much cheaper accordion; it’s a Hohner Panther, which is considered a decent student accordion. Someday, I hope to purchase a better one. Hey, I’d do farmwork to pay for it!

My husband noted the people on The Lawrence Welk Show still knew how to dance. They were cutting the rug doing polkas and waltzes; naturally, I told him it was because Welk was Catholic. I was teasing him when I said that, but it turns out it’s true! He grew up in a German and a Catholic community. He kept his faith throughout his life. He was apparently very devout and as an adult went to Mass daily to receive the Eucharist. All of this information, by the way, can be found on his Wiki page. I did no great research to write this post. However, the cursory look at his biography has piqued my curiosity, and if there’s a longer book available on him, I will find it. Biography and history are two of my favorite genres. Unfortunately, I buy biographies wherever I go, and I still have unread ones sitting by my bed. There’s something like serendipity to finding weird thrift store biographies I never would have thought to look for on Kindle. And sometimes, TV shows inspire me to seek more, too….

Speaking of, there’s a great movie out there called The Polka King. What a story that is! It’s a true story about a Polish accordion king, maybe not such a good Catholic because he ended up in prison for fraud. Just one of his schemes was to dupe Catholics into going on Vatican tours with promises of meeting the Pope. Even though he was a shyster, he still managed to get an audience with Pope John Paul II…to this day, nobody knows quite how he did it. I really recommend this film. Jack Black stars in it and, while Black is clearly demonic, he can be a great actor.

You see, I’m not obsessed with just Mexican music. I love all manner of accordion wunderkinds. There is a good German word for you. The truth is that Mexicans are simply superior at packaging the best parts of music into amazing songs. Mexicans have dramatic or intentionally flat vocals combined with goofiness and, often, barely constrained chaos. There is nothing that fulfills my vision of the world better than those descriptors. They are the descriptors I’d give to my own artistic vision when I write books: goofy, dramatic, droll, and nearly chaotic plot. When I die, please engage an accordionist to play in that manner at my funeral. Oh, and please, please, have dancing. Thank you.

*And a Polish guy too

**I realized belatedly that that last phrase looks attached to “what I want at my funeral” and not to the asterisk in the title. Have a Pole at my funeral, I don’t care. Or a Yugoslavian. I hear they are good accordionists, too.

This post was inspired by some thoughts I was having yesterday, as well as this post by Insanity Bytes. I have to admit to having kept my distance from the MRA/Alpha-game world for a while. Still, if you are at all conservative and write Sci Fi, it’s almost impossible to avoid. And in fact, that’s why I ran across this world in the first place — I write spec fic and am conservative in my values. Upon first inspection, it sounds like a net positive that men should fight for their rights in a post-feminist world (this is also how feminism continues to be sold to the masses). Feminism has been very destructive to the relationship between men and women, to families, to the economy…. I could go on. But standing up for men and their fundamental rights as humans is really not what the MRA world is all about. It is about raising the male ego by instructing men to treat women like trash. Unfortunately, this world has infected Christian circles, as well. It was rife in homeschool circles when I was also a homeschooler; this is why I experienced how toxic it was firsthand.

Like any popular movement, it goes through fads and has its own catchphrases and assumptions. One of those that has not completely died out is the one in which females are solipsistic. This might seem odd at first, being that solipsism has its place in the scientific process. How is it, then, an insult? Solipsism is using one’s own experiences to process information: the five senses, in other words. However, it also has a negative connotation when a person cannot see beyond the limitations of their experiential capacities. Women are indeed guilty of this; they often paint the world from their own perspective and project their issues on others. They hide what they’re doing by calling it empathy. They will also filter others’ experiences through their own.

But let’s be honest. Men are just as solipsistic as women are. They just don’t hide behind fancy terms such as empathy. Instead, they determine what is truth from their own perspective and make a lot of noise about how objective they are. Look, this might come across as sexist, but seriously, menfolk — yeah, I’m talking to you — at least female solipsists are attempting to understand others by their experiences in the world. I don’t see that in too many men, especially regarding the thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. of women. Men are also quite apt at ignoring the needs of people in their care: I’m not hungry, so why would anyone else be?

Both of these solipsistic responses stem from the actual fundamental difference between men and women: women are nurturers and men are there to toughen up their children or underlings at work. Therefore, I don’t want to be too hard on men. They are operating out of an essential masculine quality, but like all human attributes, it can go terribly wrong. If women are emotional projectors and/or manipulators, men can be downright narcissistic in how they approach others. And their narcissism can be truly damaging to those around them. If I had a penny for every time a gung-ho Christian man ignored the voice of his wife…well, I wouldn’t be very happy because there are too many hurting families that each penny represents.

The internet world has brought to the fore so many creeps, creeps who believe women are what’s fundamentally wrong with the world (and to be fair, creeps who think white men are the only problem…but that’s another subject). They are in every chat group, ready to speak or meme their “objective” truths, such as, “If only women understood that men talk to other men when they want an interesting conversation.” Or memed, their objectivity looks about like this:

I’m sure you’ve seen these memes…that don’t seem to go away, no matter how old and overused they are. If anything is an indication of male solipsism, they are it. My only hope for humans of both sexes and their inability to assess the world appropriately is that they grow up. Or most do. Solipsistic female projection can become self-analysis that ironically helps them have true empathy; and solipsistic male narcissism can start to look outward, allowing men to truly listen to others.

Because I only salvaged two years’ worth of posts, I’ve lost most of my old silly thoughts on our New Year’s songs. Thus, I’ll do a quick recap: Every year we take a New Year’s song. Or should I say, we accept the one that’s given to us? For years, we would go to Albuquerque on New Year’s Eve and have dinner out and then go to a movie. The Hobbit and LOTR films carried us through many of those years. Long story short, we were usually driving when it struck midnight, and whatever was playing on the radio became our New Year’s song. As Albuquerque is no longer a close drive, we’ve had to find our New Year’s songs in other ways. One year, I think it was 2017, midnight rolled over just as the credits rolled on a movie we were streaming; the song that played during the credits was Europe’s The Final Countdown. A delightful song, and it was much fun to consider what it meant to our lives. Would we be going to Venus? Would the aliens there accept us? These were important questions to consider.

Going back a few years farther to New Year’s 2015, our song was Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger. The funny thing is when we’d gone Christmas shopping a couple of weeks earlier, we’d browsed a giant mall Big 5 store, and I’d marveled at the nice exercise clothes; mine were in virtual rags because it didn’t matter to me what I looked like when I was fulfilling my OCD urges to exercise. Looking at the price tags on these goods, I was startled by how expensive workout gear was. I suppose some people need expensive clothing to look fabulous at the gym…which is another strange concept to me. Huh, the gym is simply not practical when I can do perfectly good pushups on my Pilates mat. Another long story short, my husband quipped that I was like Rocky in the first film and had the Eye of the Tiger. That was why wearing rags didn’t matter to me. It was amusing when that became our New Year’s song.

I don’t like thinking about 2015 much. It was seven long years ago, and it was the year we moved to Roswell. It was a time of too much stress and too little writing on my part. I felt my soul disappearing down the drain every time I went to work at a job I hated, only to come home and stay up a few more hours to finish a backlog of editing projects I’d taken on. I was working sixteen-hour days and living in a ghetto apartment filled with catty welfare moms, despite that I had a perfectly good house in the River Valley (yes, I’m sure I was a big complainer, too). It took me a few years, in fact, to finish The Minäverse that I’d started in 2014 and to continue taking classes and playing the accordion. It took me another few years to be okay with Roswell because Roswell brought me face to face with a culture I didn’t get along with — Texas redneck culture.

Fast forward to New Year 2022, and we were listening to a streaming eighties’ channel (I would’ve chosen Mexican music, but you know how it is…); what do you think came on at the stroke of midnight? If you guessed Eye of the Tiger, you are correct. Only, I don’t like to think of what that song entails. Having a focused eye is one thing, but think about the symmetry of this song playing for us this year: it’s been seven years since we moved to Roswell — we always make big changes in our lives every seven years — and we plan to move back to the River Valley this year, as well. How…? Why…? The New Year’s song is a silly little thing we do instead of resolutions. Do you think maybe God has a sense of humor? I wonder sometimes. I mean, I know he does, or we humans wouldn’t be so inclined towards a desire to laugh. We are made in his image, after all.

The only thing I ask of this year is that I don’t work sixteen-hour days editing and being a customer service representative. I’m not cut out for customer service, even though I will always be a workaholic to some extent. By the way, another funny symmetry just occurred to me. I actually did make a New Year’s resolution in 2015. I resolved to read a book a week because I’d largely stopped reading for fun due to editing so many books. Anyway, I made a resolution this year to read a book a week in Spanish. Yes, in Spanish. I’m currently reading a frou-frou romance because I didn’t want to start with sophisticated vocabulary. It turns out the book was written in Spain Spanish, and thus, the vocabulary is still a bit out of my reach. I’ve always studied Mexican Spanish. Much of it is the same, obviously, but there are still a number of words I have to look up. Also, I’ve never learned the vosotros conjugations. Oh, well, I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Here’s to having the Eye of the Tiger. Most of my goals are already daily habits: exercise, study Spanish and Finnish, write and edit my books, play the accordion. Right now, I’m working on the PenTriagon sequel, editing the Breakin’ Good book, and I’m learning a song on the accordion called La Del Moño Colorado. It has a simple accordion part, but most of the songs I learn do. I’m no great musician. Oh, hey, why not leave you with that song below instead of an old eighties’ song? Watch the whole video because the dancing is truly amazing. If it’s one thing I despise most about our American Protestant culture, it’s giving up codified couple dancing. Protestant men can’t or won’t dance. Such a shame.

…of media manipulation and gaslighting. I know: it’s what they do. They do it all year, in every season. They don’t seem to have one special holiday of adoration to their Lord Satan (oh, come on! It’s a joke…kind of. Who is the father of lies?). But, heavens, the doozies I’ve seen in the last twenty-four hours! They must feel they need to ring in the New Year loudly y con fuerza.

Does anyone else find the gaslighting frustrating? I do. And it’s not merely gaslighting. It’s double-speak. It’s spin. It’s speculation treated as fact. All of that could be considered gaslighting, if it flies in the face of the reality people are actually experiencing. No matter what you call it, it falls under the umbrella of deceit.

Last night, I found myself chuckling when I read a headline calling night sweats a “very strange” symptom of Omicron. The media does like to engage in “much ado about nothing,” except they’ve been using Covid to push a fear narrative for over two years now, and it’s no longer funny. So, I’m not sure why I was chuckling. I guess absurdity still strikes my funny bone. If they don’t have anything else, it will be oh no, night sweats. At least I know it’s nothing to worry about if that’s all they can come up with.

Later, I read what I thought would be an informative article about blood type and Rh factor and whether they play a role in fighting Covid. But I gave up when this particular “science” article speculated that the reason countries without as much access to medical care have fared better with Covid was their underreporting of deaths and positive cases. Okay, I can see that as perhaps part of the problem. Or part of the solution, as I don’t believe our tests or our death statistics are even remotely accurate. I have many, many reasons for doubting them…which would take me another article to write about. Another frustrated rant. Another B-girl fest. I’m very good at the last in the list, if nothing else.

On the other hand, I believe that we’ve had far, far too many Covid deaths due to our access to medical care. Speaking of gaslighting, we in wealthy westernized nations have been told that preventive care is fake news and anti-science this entire pandemic. People who suggest preventive care, in fact, are silenced on social media and have been throughout. This has left those who get very sick with no recourse but to go the hospital and have tubes jammed down their throat when the cytokine storm happens, which it will for a certain percentage of the population. By that time, it’s too late, sorry. You’re much more likely to die after having had a tube jammed down your airway. Meanwhile, the people in poor countries who have little access to hospitals have been forced to rely on “unscientific” preventive medicine. Magically, they’ve fared better. I mean, it can’t be attributed to science, so it must be magic.

And then there were the cherry articles, all the drama over Omicron. Omg (if you say that long form, it sounds like Omicron but is also probably blasphemous, so…) everyone is getting sick because it’s so infectious. Now society is going to shut down from sick people unless you go out and get the vaccine, except please forget that part of the labor shortage is due to vaccine mandates for essential and nonessential workers alike. Many workers walked away at the mandates. Of course, that’s not to mention that there was already a labor shortage because, after having time off due to Covid shutdowns, some workers realized they didn’t want to be treated like garbage for low pay anymore. The employees that are left are the vaccinated hardcore. And they are the ones getting sick! Irony upon irony abounds. No matter how the media spins their emotional manipulation, I end up scratching my head. Our media and government overlords, I’ve determined, will not be happy until everyone gets Trump’s shots (another irony) and is reliant on the multitude of boosters because they are sick and stupid and can no longer buy groceries because the labor shortages could not be warded away with the vaccine charms. Not that the overlords ever desired our good.

Welcome to 2022! Welcome to continued shutdowns and panics over colds and viruses we used to live with as a normal course of things! I’m at the point that I wish we didn’t have freedom of the press, so these idiot journalists couldn’t go around spouting their nonsense. Oh, wait, we don’t have freedom of the press. That’s why preventive medicine is fake news and anti-science.

Sorry, friends. I really want 2022 to be the best year yet, but so far, I find myself engaged in one long mental face palm.

That title is meant to be sung on a scale with ever-ascending key changes. I love to listen to Handel’s Messiah at this time of year. Outside of Mexican music, it’s difficult to pique my interest unless I hear my old favorites, Vivaldi and Handel. Handel was terrible to his vocalists, though. The rumor goes he once threw a soprano out a window, but historical rumors are the result of the real-life version of the game telephone. The actual story is quite a bit different than the rumor. What is true is Handel’s obtuseness towards humans and their pitch limitations. It’s difficult to find a soprano who can sing all parts in The Messiah. The ones who can are rare creatures, probably with a touch of the other-wordly in their souls.*

What is joy? I asked this question some time ago. I don’t think it’s wearing an undying smile, like Will Farrell in Elf, albeit, the restoration of childlike joy is the theme of that film. I know that film is incredibly goofy, but it really is about joy. The perpetual smile is simply Farrell’s discomforting manner of passing along the message. Think about it: in elfland, the people dwell with Santa. They have no reason not to believe in his existence and, therefore, they are constantly joyful. Back in the “real” world of men, people lack both faith and joy. I had concluded these two intangibles were interconnected in a post several months ago. Funny how a silly Hollywood film came to that conclusion years ago.

It’s no secret humans get caught up in the kind of pursuits that will never bring them joy. They — or we rather — are about boosting our egos, rescuing our egos, or just getting along to get along. It makes life such a drag. But you know what isn’t a drag? Appreciating the small moments given to us by God and acknowledging his presence in our lives. I’m visiting my sister and there is snow outside the window: beautiful gifts from God. She went to midnight Mass with me and, speaking of vocalists, the church had a lovely choir singing Christmas carols the entire half hour before midnight. That, too, was a beautiful gift from God, brought to me from people who have faith in him. Or, one hopes they have faith. One assumes church goers do, but there’s no guarantee. Sometimes people just keep doing these things they assume will bring them joy.

Appreciating beauty and small moments with each other and with nature is not outside the worldview of secularists, regardless of whether they choose to go to church. In fact, there is a push for gratefulness in humanism. They seem to grasp the necessity for a karmic expression of what goes around, comes around. If we express our gratitude to the universe, as it were, we will find more goodness in the future. This becomes hope, and hope is intertwined with faith. One hopes it is. But…there is always a but.

On Christmas Eve, we drove around neighborhoods looking at lights. There was an entire neighborhood in Tigard that had come together to decorate their houses. The houses were secular: those that attempted a religious perspective either put up rainbow signs with love wins or the generic believe. My youngest niece, who is twenty and tired of empty platitudes, demanded to know what that meant: “Believe in what?” she asked. “Everything has been debunked.” Colorful lights are lovely, a spot of beauty, but platitudes do nothing for the soul.

Humanism is an empty conceit at a certain point. Even secularists’ gratefulness turns weary and pales. What do they actually have to believe in, aside from reforming all humans into a utopic vision? And then what? Faith and joy may be interconnected, but the faith has to be in something real, something outside an overarching belief in humanity and our own wretched imitation of love. Love wins. Sure it does, when it is self-sacrificial and doesn’t consider its own life and ego to be of utmost importance. It wins when we acknowledge that encouraging people in their selfish, sinful desires is not good for them. It is not, in fact, loving to spin oneself into death and decay with self-congratulatory back pats. Love wins when it is real, and when it concedes that man did not create itself. Sorry, but I cannot believe in humanity. Not ultimately. Sometimes they will surprise you with their pursuit of goodness, but all that does is demonstrate they were created in the image of a good God who also gave them the ability to choose Him.

If there’s one message I want to pass along it’s that God has not yet been debunked. It is impossible to debunk God. It hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen. That is the message both young and old people need to hear. They need to hear that their lives matter because they were divinely created, and their creator committed a self-sacrificial act to save them from themselves. That kind of faith brings lasting joy. And it’s intangible enough and yet logical enough that when men are given this message, they respond. Not always positively…but that is why joy is so precious.

*So, what is the real story of Handel throwing a soprano out the window? It is worth looking up — it’s an intriguing historical tale. It had nothing to do with her inability to sing the high notes. Rather, he threatened to throw her out the window because this particular “ethereal” being acted like an ego-driven prima donna. Oh, well. Let’s hope she found joy in the end.

In my post the other day about dissatisfying books, I forgot to mention that The Red Queen was a book I’d originally purchased for my son, as he’d joined a book club at school. The book pushed him quickly out of the club, and I read it only so my money wouldn’t be wasted. I must say I’m a little irritated. If the club had picked a better book, my son might still be in it. However, after reading it, I can certainly sympathize with him. I only bring this up to highlight the state of the YA industry. Our nation is currently post-literate, and YA books are more likely to be written by young, illiterate writers with their pretentions extending to the heights of The Hunger Games or Harry Potter.

I did what I usually do when frustrated by low-quality art and thinking; I dropped fiction for nonfiction. Currently, I’m reading a book called Rethinking Mary. I can’t give an opinion on it yet, but I appreciate the premise thus far. The book’s goal is to examine Marian beliefs, not by applying external logic, but by applying internal logic and historical context. That is, it’s an examination of how historical Christians extrapolated their beliefs from the logic of Scripture. I bought a few other books, such as the All Creatures Great and Small series, but I haven’t yet cracked them. I started with the Marian book because it’s Advent and Christmas is later this week. This is my Christmas book of the year.

And as the year is coming to an end, I’m taking a break from writing. It wasn’t intended. It happened because I had too much other work and major life changes occurring. I will start again in January. It’s a good time to assess what I have completed, writing wise. First of all, after sitting on the completed Order of the PenTriagon for a year, I formatted it for print and ebook and published it. I also finished my breakdancing cyberpunk book, though I’m still editing it. Its working title is Breaking Lo Bueno or Breakin’ Good…. Yeah, I know. It’s a play off Breaking Bad because it takes place in Albuquerque and is about breakdancing. Don’t hate me. I’m sure I’ll change the title before I publish.

I was about 70,000 words into my Gothic romance ghost story before I decided I shouldn’t be doing such delightful pleasure writing when I had a sequel to write for Order of the PenTriagon. Unfortunately, I’m only about 30,000 words into the sequel, but I have high hopes of finishing it in a couple of months. Neither of these latter books have working titles, unless you consider OotP Part 2 and Ghost Story to be proper titles.

That’s about it, then. I found some books to read that will carry me through the holidays, and my writing continues despite any tangible reason for it to do so. This sentiment just reminded me that I’ve been playing Caminos de la Vida on the accordion lately, and it’s a sad, sad song about how the paths we end up taking in this life aren’t exactly what we imagine when we’re young and still filled with dreams. There is a specific context to the song, having to do with the arduous work impoverished single mothers face. But it has a broader philosophical appeal, as all humans suffer disappointments and face unexpected and unwanted trials.

It’s true, you know. We dream when we’re young, and I honestly can say it’s a blessing we can’t see into the future. If we could, would we still struggle toward our goals? I don’t know; I really don’t. But that’s because I can only see yesterday’s future, which is known as the present. The future-future is still unknowable to me. You see, I might as well keep going with my struggles. That’s what it means to have faith and to believe that God provides everything we truly need, even if los caminos de la vida no son como yo pensaba….imaginaba….creía. The song uses all the words: the paths of life aren’t what I thought, imagined, or believed.

My favorite songs are about birds. They are a convenient poetic device, I guess, due to behavior patterns like migration and characteristics like their wings, their feathers, and their hollow bones. Oh, and they sing, too. That’s not to mention that my favorite songs are in Spanish, and even the ordinary sounds intriguing in a second language.

My favorite song for years has been Ramón Ayala’s rendition of Mi Golondrina, a song about a swallow that comes and goes, and the narrator isn’t quite sure if she’ll return. It’s the song I keep singing, while wondering if my own swallow will return — that is, poetry. I used to write poems. I know it’s asking a lot of a song to contain my longing for the intangible … but that’s exactly what good songs do.

Another is El Coyote’s Amor Pajarito. This one is a sad song about a little bird heart that is always getting entrapped. There’s something enchanting to me about a little bird heart. I suppose my bird heart is trapped in his singing. I really do love El Coyote’s voice; sometimes I listen to an 180-song playlist someone compiled on YouTube. The combination of bright brass instruments, emotive vocals and a little bird is the triangulation of perfection. The perfect song. La canción de canciones.

Back to Maestro Ramón, he has a rather dark song called Gaviota. It’s a song about a man whose love is a seagull who has flown away across the ocean. Because he doesn’t have wings as she does and can’t follow her, he decides that if he finds her by the sea, he will clip her wings to keep her with him. I’m not sure that kind of love works out well, but the song is lovely and contemplative nonetheless. I’ve always liked the sound of this: para qué, para qué si no hay por qué. But there always will be a why. She’ll always ask why, and she won’t understand.

There is, of course, the requisite song about a lovelorn man who wants to save the Ave Cautiva like that above. I refer to a song by Conjunto Primavera. The sad part is he will be no more successful at rescuing his love than the man who wants to keep his love by force. Well, I suppose miracles always happen, but people trapped in abusive relationships are often addicted to their cages and won’t leave even if the door is left open.

I could go on and on. I thought of a song about a Paloma Blanca (White Dove), and one about a little dove (El Palomito) with incredible accordion parts, and another called Quisiera Ser Pajarillo (I Want to be a Little Bird). Actually, that latter one has really pretty lyrics. And I do want to be a bird. In the same manner as the above songs, Psalm 55:6 makes me wistful: And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest. Or, because this post has a Spanish theme: Y dije: ¡Quién me diese alas como de paloma! Volaría yo, y descansaría.

Birds leave; birds return and bring olive branches. They soar with wings outstretched. And they sing. Don’t forget that. And if they don’t find the nest they once abandoned, they build a new one. Maybe that’s what it’s all about for me: buscando un nido.

It just occurred to me that my dad also loves birds. This is what I could capture on a screenshot, but it barely scratches the surface on his bird images: