August 2015

Word Count

Goal: 10,000 words

Word count for August: 5,418

Ouch.  Not even close!  My boss was on sabbatical this month and apparently I took a page from her book and goofed off RESTED as well.  Eh, c’est la vie.  You win some, you lose some.

Books

I finished Sarah’s Key which, in the end, I still thought ok but not remarkable.  I moved on to Truth & Beauty mid-month, which I really enjoyed.  It’s a memoir of a friendship between two writers, Ann Patchett & Lucy Grealy.  It ends tragically and made me add “never do heroin” to my list of prayers for my kids but it read like a novel and I couldn’t put it down by the end.

After Truth & Beauty, I moved on to Ta-Nehisi Coate’s new book, Between the World & Me, which was a relatively short one but it was engrossing, especially the second half.  I’m leading a discussion of this one in a couple weeks and I’m really looking forward to it.  If you’re in the Seattle area, you should join us!

I also continued reading God Laughs & Plays and the chapter on Iraq wrecked me.  I started the chapter, titled When Compassion Becomes Dissent, thinking, “oh, he’s going to talk about politics again.”  I thought I might end up skimming the rest but it was riveting.  You don’t know what you don’t know, right?  Turns out there is a LOT that I don’t know about our recent history with Iraq.  At one point, Duncan explains that,

“…it was the first Bush administration, not Saddam’s regime, that blew up Iraq’s water treatment facilities, and not as an act of war but as a carefully researched act that accurately predicted the ravaging of civilians and children.”

And then goes on to quote a friend of his, a nurse name Gerri Haynes, who visited Iraq on several missions of mercy and saw thousands and thousands of dying children because we, the United States, blew up their water treatment facilities.  She shares her views on why Americans are silent on such matters:

“The psyche wants balance.  It doesn’t want a sudden shocking awareness of things that would compel us to change our lives… An already burdened person can hardly bear such news.  Most Americans are kind-hearted.  The plain sight of suffering and dying children would inspire almost any of them to realign their lives, change their work, their habits, their thinking, anything, if they saw they were contributing to thousands of children’s demise.  It’s very very hard to hear this kind of thing…

But we pay taxes.  So we fund these disasters… but this doesn’t say anything to the experience of going to hospital after hospital and seeing every bed with a child in it, sometimes two children per bed… It doesn’t speak to the experience of watching mothers and fathers feel hopeless and helpless to save their children.  We live on hope.  How can we not tell other Americans about what we have participated in creating.”

I was admittedly only in junior high school when we destroyed their water supply but it was sort of shattering to learn nonetheless.  And it made me wonder what other things my tax dollars are doing without my knowledge or understanding?

On my nightstand

Tattoos on the Heart (currently reading)
Take This Bread
Just Mercy
God Laughs & Plays

Goals for September

10,000 words (book & blog combined)

I’m curious to see how my time writing takes on new dimensions with both boys in school.  Here’s to hoping I get a tad closer to my goal this month!

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Monthly Report for July