118. Our current milieu

Forgiveness and compassion

What I’m up to

We drove an hour away to check out an exceedingly cool coffee shop that requires calling on an intercom to enter, speakeasy style. I am willing to go to increasingly greater lengths to motivate myself to work, but it’s not all that effective because I’m writing this instead of working.

That’s ok. It’s the weekend and my grad class is over. I’m allowed to have some fun (by writing this).

It’s been a doozy of a week. My students took their AP exam. My daughter has 2 weeks left of school. I’ve been in my head a lot. The lows were low.

But! Here’s a highlight of my week: Anna L., one of my very first students and now friend, interviewed me for her newsletter Girl Power. I loved our conversation. Check it out here.

What I’m reading

I just finished Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, the book everyone and their mother is reading. Anna L. recommended it, which finally convinced me to track it down. It’s about a “tradwife” influencer who finds herself mysteriously transported to the very world she is peddling on IG. It’s a truly incisive look at our current milieu. Very gripping.

I’m also listening to This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum. I downloaded it because it is described as “genre-bending” (romance/mystery). It’s fun.

Reading The Lilac People by Milo Todd for book club.

What I’m watching

I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2 in the theater. It was fun (although needlessly convoluted. IMO they could’ve cut like 7 storylines). I somehow expected more character development over the twenty years that have passed since the first one. But I enjoyed it!

We watched The Nice Guys and Point Break over two movie nights.

For TV night, we finished The Night Of (recommend!) and moved on to Band of Brothers, which almost everyone in the group except me has seen multiple times.

I also caught up on Your Friends and Neighbors, which is just the kind of TV show I get sucked into despite myself.

I am also watching Wuthering Heights in increments while washing dishes. 😬 It’s so… atmospheric. I haven’t read the book, and I know all the characters are unlikeable and the adaptation is problematic, but I’m actually finding the central romance so painfully sad.

What I’m thinking about

I was talking to someone the other day about a movie I won’t name because then this whole section will be a spoiler. Suffice to say, the central question of the movie is Should we always forgive? We were both firmly on side of “anything can be forgiven,” although reading online responses to the film shows many viewers disagree. At the end of the day, I know we all have our dark sides; each of us has the capability to hurt. So yes, I think we should always try to forgive. So the question becomes What does it take to forgive? The movie (and this person I was talking to) suggests that maybe the only way forward is both parties agreeing to a fresh start. At some point you just have to give up on understanding something or working through something and just agree to start over.

I’ve written before about how much I love the sentiment of God’s mercies being new every morning. I love a fresh start more than anyone I know. But I don’t think it’s always as simple as hitting reset. I’d argue you can’t truly have a fresh start without an honest trudging through whatever hurt or crap it is that needs to be forgiven, and doing so takes both parties. Otherwise, wouldn’t one (or both) of you always have that little knot of sadness or confusion nestled in your gut? Shoving everything under the metaphorical bed and starting over might be the easy way out. Sometimes the craziness, the grappling, the violent emotional response (à la in the movie) is the more honest road to true reconciliation. Grapple in honesty - and then both the person hurt and the person-who-hurt can choose to have compassion towards each other.

I was asking Paul for advice about a couple of tricky situations recently. Is it better to tackle a dilemma directly or just work on it internally and try to move on? He said if you can just deal with it yourself, that would be easier. But if you’ll just continually feel bad (that little knot of sadness I was talking about), maybe it’s necessary to bring it up, to have the difficult conversation, even if you don’t know how it will turn out.

Wise words.

In the case of the movie, I think the characters were better for having gone through relational hell from having every secret revealed. At some point, everything inevitably rises to the surface. It’s worth sacrificing the metaphorical wedding to get to an honest marriage. If you choose to stay together after everything comes out, that’s a love story.

(I bet my conflict-averse friends will disagree vehemently. If you’re the kind who can truly just deal with things internally, more power to you, but maybe understand that other people in your life might need the grappling.)

What I’m learning

I woke up at 5:30 last Monday to an alert that the grade for my last assignment was out and in clicking through, I realized I had missed an entire additional assignment - one that would bring my grade from a 100% to a B+. The prof had even reminded us that since it was the last assignment, she wouldn’t accept late work. I am truly so on top of my grad work; this was a result of a technical glitch that somehow kept the assignment from showing up on my Canvas to-do list. You better believe I wrote her a desperate email and then got to work then and there.

I locked in HARD and turned it in right before I had to head to school. Thankfully, she accepted the late assignment.

Let me just tell you that being a student myself has made me a more compassionate teacher.

When is compassion not a good idea? As a teacher (and a parent), I guess I would say it’s not a good idea when it enables bad habits or behavior. But man, most of the time we’re all just doing the best we can. So yeah, err on the side of compassion.

What I’m digging

I really enjoy Tainan. Some of the neighborhoods make me feel like I’m in Taipei (compliment). It’s got a charm that is absent from most parts of downtown Kaohsiung.

Olivia Rodrigo’s new songs. “Drop Dead” is almost painfully joyful. “Begged” is just painful, in the most relatable way. Honestly, OR can do no wrong in my book.

Anna is newly obsessed with SNL. I’m digging that.

Until next time,

Kate