Requesting Input for Improving the Republic

Beginning January 2014, I decided the start of a new year would be a good time to promote an idea that might then open a meaningful dialogue about a way to improve our republic. Given the response that greeted my idea that first year for a 28th amendment to the U.S. constitution establishing term limits for members of Congress, I've since been emboldened to use my platform in the blogosphere for additional ideas in the hope of continuing the dialogue. How can this hurt? Won't we all be enriched if we make a sincere effort to live up to those lofty ideals of ours?    

For this iteration of my series in civics, I'd like your input. Which of the previous suggestions made here do you believe would deliver the greatest benefit? 

* 2014:  Establishing mandatory term limits for members of Congress

* 2015:  Abolishing the Electoral College, i.e., using the popular vote to elect the President

* 2016:  Revising the wording of the 2nd amendment to reflect contemporary realities     

* 2017:  Setting an age limit for the President using evolving science re average onset age of dementia 

* 2018:  Converting one of the fifty states into a self-governing territory for white supremacists

* 2021:  Ending the term of any Supreme Court Justice caught sleeping during sworn testimony   

* 2024:  Requiring every individual on the national presidential ballot score 100% on a standardized test re the U.S. constitution

Only the 2021 suggestion is "new". That time I requested you first send your ideas before I revealed my own. The post that year was met with radio silence. I then kept my promise, petulantly holding onto my brilliant notion until this moment.  

 

What do you say? BTW, any of the seven earlier posts in full are available upon request. Yeah, right. 

Kryptonite and Spinach

Just to be sure we're all on the same page before beginning today's thought experiment: Kryptonite strips Superman of his power. Spinach helps Popeye surmount challenges. Ready?

Put aside the hyperbole. Avoid being overly literal. And remember: We all have at least one Superman-like superpower, something exceptional that has been in us from the start. If that premise strikes you as immodest, forgive me in advance, but stay engaged long enough to tell me about your kryptonite and your spinach. I'll go first, of course. Been at this blogging thing for almost fifteen years; I know the deal. 

The kryptonite that can strip me of my energy - my superpower - is apathy. I realize I'm giving away too much by feeling low when people don't respond enthusiastically to my energy. Knowing that and dealing with it well in the moment continues to be a battle for me.    

My spinach is the innate goodness I see in many people I meet. I'm not naive. Nor am I oblivious to cruelty, hate, and injustice. But I am able to surmount challenges easier knowing I'm bound to soon run across another kind and gracious person. 

Please join me.

Happy to Pay This Debt

"I felt dizzy again from aliveness. Flush with baffle and excitement, like the first person to touch snow." 

Martyr! is a novel that deserves a reader's full attention. Kaveh Akbar's 2024 powerhouse has narrative momentum, inventive architecture, and prose that sings. Twenty-seven-year-old Cyrus Shams is a memorably flawed, thoroughly modern protagonist, one you will root for at the same time you're laughing at his frequently comic missteps. My sole regret connected to this recent reading experience has nothing to do with either this exemplary book or author. 

Upon finishing a highly lauded, maddeningly discursive novel I'd started on the same day as Martyr!, it was clear that reading the two novels at the same time was a tactical error. My mistake was apparent from the moment my full attention turned to Akbar's tour-de-force. After reviewing the few notes I'd made to that point about Martyr!, I then re-read a few earlier key passages. Good decision. From that point, I was re-assured that I'd been in capable hands all along. Any previous doubts? Misplaced. I had quite simply bit off more than I could chew.   

Though I don't plan to abandon my longstanding practice of sometimes reading more than one book at a time, I am re-considering my approach, effective immediately. If a dense or discursive book is using an undue amount of my mental bandwidth, I now plan to devote my energy to that book alone. I owe that to storytelling prose stylists as talented as Kaveh Akbar.

"They sat there ... each quietly measuring the texture of the silence, the history between them."  

The Crab and the Prattler

 "Uh-huh", "no kidding?", "really?", etc. 

When did you most recently overhear an extended conversation wherein one of the two people involved repeatedly used some variation of those three polite responses? How long did it take before you began to wonder when the second person in this ostensible conversation was ever going to stop prattling?

Although sometimes perversely intrigued by the oblivious prattler in these situations, what fascinates me more is how creative the polite listeners can be. In my most recent experience, I lost count after about ten polite, non-committal responses. Aside from the three reliable chestnuts above, I also heard "wow", "you don't say", and - the one that really got my attention - "interesting". Crab that I am, I was most taken by that particular response probably because of how little I found mildly interesting in the jabberer's non-stop monologue. Churlish of me I know but there you have it.

In the thirty or so minutes I was privy to this interaction, the jabbering prattler didn't ask a single question of the listener. And that polite, creative, much-more-gracious-than-Pat person? Didn't seem to mind. This churlish crab will benefit a great deal more by remembering to emulate the grace of the listener vs. dwelling on the cluelessness of the prattler. Begin, again. 

Stop & Start, Continue: 2026

Today's post is the 13th iteration featuring the Stop-Start-Continue model as a new year begins. For an obvious reason, this one combines the stop and start components. If you decide to join me - as many of you have since 2012 - use any combination of the three components that works for you. The important piece is to make a commitment, public or otherwise, about something you plan to stop as this new year begins, and/or something else you plan to start, and/or something else that has worked for you that you plan to purposefully continue doing as 2026 unfolds. 

In 2026, I plan to stop focusing as much in my daily journal on the past and instead to start looking forward and writing about the future. This intention for the new year became clear to me in part because of an insightful conversation on New Year's Eve with good friends. One of them said that keeping a journal had never appealed to her because she saw little value - for herself - in reviewing the past. The other - who, like me, keeps a daily journal - indicated her journal was purposefully future focused. The more I thought about what both of them had said, the stronger my intention to stop and start became.

In 2026, I plan to continue ramping up the number of open jazz jam sessions I attend. Though I disappoint myself frequently in these situations, I know there's no better way to improve as a musician than by performing in front of a live audience. And, for anyone who has doubts about using a stop-start-continue model to hold yourself accountable, I encourage you to read last year's post from this same series, directly below. Note the continue pledge therein.

Reflections from the Bell Curve: Stop - Start - Continue: 2025 

Wish me luck and best of luck to anyone who joins me.   

Best of 2025

Please consider sharing with me and others some things you're grateful for that came your way in 2025. There's ample research citing the mental health benefit connected to a regular practice of acknowledging gratitude. Use the headings below or invent your own. I've used a few of these headings on and off since initiating the series in 2012; others were created for this year. 

Best book finished in 2025, also published in 2025:  Today marks the third time in under five weeks I've mentioned Lily King's 2025 novel Heart the Lover in a blog post. That alone indicates the impact it had on me. A brand-new book in a "Best of..." post has happened only once before - in 2024 - when Percival Everett's James pummeled me, albeit for different reasons altogether. 

Best moment of musical communion: During the maiden voyage of my music course entitled Women of Heart and Mind, I scanned the room of about thirty adults as we all listened to Karla Bonoff's Goodbye My Friend. Witnessing their reaction to that song was a gift I'm reasonably sure I'll never forget.

Best inspirational quote discovered for future blog use: "If love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will" - James Baldwin. 

Best tribe-related moment: I'm auditing a class on short stories led by a reading soulmate. In the same class are - a.) a new friend from my hiker's group; b.) another friend who belongs to my book club; c.) the moderator of a writer's group I joined early in 2025, fast becoming a friend; d.) a regular attendee of my music classes. This wasn't planned; I was as surprised to see the four of them as they were to see me.

Best news: No competition here. Early in December, my daughter and her partner landed a deal to write an animated film for Disney based on the irrepressible Junie B. Jones from the children's book series by Barbara Park. Stay tuned for future bragging. 

Happy new year! 

Gave Up on Giving Up Until ...

How often do you give up on a book you've started? 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my response to that question - asked of me recently by a new friend - is different today than it would have been if asked of me at earlier points in my reading life. How about you? Can you identify any discreet phases you've moved through as a reader when you were either more or less inclined to give up on books you'd started?    

As a young adult, I routinely gave up on many books I'd started. But until I carefully considered how to answer my friend's question, I didn't fully realize how my impatience played a large part in that. Then, as I dug deeper, it became clear that much of my impatience was closely tied to immaturity as a reader and insecurity as a thinker. Well into my thirties, any book that regularly challenged me via references I didn't immediately comprehend was impatiently abandoned. Bottom line: If an author knew a lot of things I didn't, I gave up. Aside from insecurity, what could explain this? 

Although not certain when this earlier-in-life reflex began to shift, I do recall a few things that I now equate with my growth as a reader and thinker. The first was a deepening respect for the views of John Leonard, a prominent NY Times book critic. Also, I started trusting the opinions of people who read more widely than me, like my sister. This led me to work harder at finishing things that I would have jettisoned a few years earlier. I can even remember the first book I returned to after giving up on it at least twice before - One Hundred Years of Solitude. Soon after finishing that and recognizing some of my other earlier surrenders were likely a mistake, I decided to give up on giving up if either a respected critic or a trusted reader told me a book was worth some effort. I've never regretted that decision and use the same reasoning to this day. But the full answer to my friend's question now has a third act caveat.

Early in 2010, I stopped working full time, began a book journal, joined my first-ever book club. A year later I started this blog, a decision accompanied by a commitment to become the best writer I could be in my remaining years. How to do that? Devote all my precious reading hours to the best possible prose. As a consequence, when I give up on a book I've started these days - which I now routinely do, again - it's no longer related to impatience, or its malignant first cousins, immaturity or insecurity. Clunky sentences, cliched metaphors, tired dialogue? Give up. Excessive exposition, unidimensional characters, cliff-hanging chapter endings? Move on. Verbs that don't caress, adjectives that add no value, adverbs run amok? Next. These days, even when a book comes my way via a respected critic or trusted reader, if the writing has nothing to teach me, I'm done. 

How often do you give up on a book you've started?  

Forgive Me, In Advance

About a week from now I'll take my once-a-year look at the analytics that Google collects for bloggers. At this point - almost fifteen years in - I'm able to manage my expectations far better than in the early years.

But no matter what those numbers say, my blog gave me more joy in 2025 than in any previous year for a few reasons.

* The number of offline conversations connected to something I mused about here was satisfying. This included an instance when a new friend and sometimes reader used one of my posts as a prompt at a writing workshop and another instance when a few of my Mt. Rushmore entries and goyim journeys into Yiddish ignited a conversation with several people during an extended hike. 

* Though the number of comments received in 2025 were about the same as in years past, the insights were uniformly richer. In addition, several new readers became frequent commenters - online and off - and the number of anonymous comments published here increased enough to be noticeable. Though I recognized some of those "anonymous" folks, there were just as many I couldn't identify. That's kind of fun because it allows me to harmlessly fantasize that someone I don't know stumbled across my blog somehow. Even better - and just as harmless - maybe that new reader will hang in there for a while?

* My joy was most enhanced by the unwavering support of people who have been by my virtual side now for years. I can never thank any of you enough. During a recent phone conversation, I was overcome with gratitude when one stalwart supporter said how much he appreciated me "... putting yourself out there all the time ..."  I hope all of you know how your support sustains and energizes me.

In the meanwhile, wish me luck with those analytics. If it sounds at all like I'm licking my wounds early in 2026, forgive me.