1. Started working on this yesterday, then completely forgot about it.

2. This week I went out to Arizona to shop for apartments. My biggest thrill is that there are actual mountains visible from where I’m going to be living (at least from the city: not sure about the apartment itself). We don’t have any real mountains in Michigan, and though there are mountains in Maine, they’re not visible from where my sister lives (just on the road to and from: spotted a far-distant Mt. Washington when I was there last). But in Phoenix, the city is surrounded by mountains, the kind that seem to surge right up out of the plain. Not landscape can be too drab when there are mountains in view.

3. The weather while I was there peaked at a brisk 118 degrees, by the way.

4. The good news is that I found a place to apply. The bad news is that I only found one possible out of four or five that I went down to look at. None of the others had anything available in my time frame, nor did they seem all that impressive (the first place I went had the most disinterested, mumbling saleswoman I’ve ever encountered). I put in the application, and the past couple days have been a struggle to iron out the snags that have been popping up. They seem mostly cleared up now, but I’m not going to feel safe until I get the final approval.

5. I got sucked into reading the Anne of Green Gables books (I’d read the first two before, had to re-read the first for my new job, and couldn’t stop myself). I’m on the fourth book now: Anne of Windy Poplars.

I was actually a little surprised when I first started reading to find that Anne is only a little girl in the first book, and not even for the whole of that. Most of the rest of the time she’s a teenager or young woman and eventually settles into the role of a kind of social vigilante, going around helping people who are snubbed or lonely and brightening up the world around her. It’s all crackling good fun and dear Anne herself is a delightful heroine. And honestly, it’s fun to watch her grow up and become more assertive and mature over the course of the series.

6. The Social Mores story has sadly died out, so far as I can tell, along with the said mores that would make them interesting. You can’t write a fun story of a free spirit in a world where everyone professes to be a free spirit and where there are no ‘standards’ only absolute rules pretending not to be rules.

The mistake that seems to be so often made in thinking of the SM story is that we imagine the point is to attack and discredit the SMs. But my reading of the ones I’ve read is much different; it isn’t about defeating the social mores, so that we replace the existing standards of Prince Edward Island with Anne’s, because Anne’s manners and style of living are inherently superior to those of the others. It’s more about illustrating the limitations and purposes of the SMs. The manners and standards exist for a reason, but the tendency, as ever, is to take them as the absolute. Anne, along with other characters like Elizabeth Bennett, challenges the absurd misapplication of the standards, the one that forgets why we have them in the first place, not necessarily the standards themselves.

That is, they’re stories about moderation and proper application. So…yeah, you can see why they went out of fashion.

7. And right as I’m finishing this, there is a shooting only a few blocks from where I live. Police are calling it a ‘random incident’, which is such an incredibly meaningless term under the circumstances that I have to wonder their PR department couldn’t come up with anything better.

For the record, I wasn’t affected and only found out about it when I picked up my phone and saw an alert. But in any case, please pray for everyone who was involved.