"You're just a goddamn plant influencer!" some rando on the internet accused my brother.
For the record, my little brother has a kelly green thumb, and he's pretty active in the online plant forums, sharing his indoor-grown potted olive trees, his giant poinsettia, and his 7-foot tall (2.1 m) fiddlehead fern that he grew from a mere 18" (46 cm) tall.
Paul wasn't bothered and just thought it was funny. A plant influencer? Hell of an insult, right? I laughed when he told me about it and wondered what set the guy off.
I searched Amazon and found the following T-shirt, and had it sent to my brother.
I didn't say who it was from, figuring he'd get the joke and know who sent it.
But weeks went by, and no texts asking me if I'd sent him the shirt, no FB posts, nothing.
So, finally, I texted him:
Hey, did you ever get a T-shirt in the mail that you weren't expecting?
Lol yes
Then the phone rang, and Paul was laughing. "They sent me a shirt, and I thought it was a scam. Someone sends you something you didn't order, and they include a barcode, and you scan it, and it blows up your phone or something."
"A scam? Why would you think that?"
Paul started laughing harder, "because it's the ugliest shirt I've ever seen."
It was hard not to laugh along, but I was utterly flummoxed. The shirt I’d ordered was kind of attractive - I didn’t think anyone would describe it as ugly. "What shirt did they send you?!?" I asked.
At this point, Paul was wheezing with laughter, and it was almost hard to understand him. "It's a picture of a ripped werewolf," and then he said something about a kitten.
"Whut? Can you send me a picture?" I asked. A moment later, he texted me the following image:
"Mom and Sean are looking at me like I've got two heads," he said, still laughing, then called to them, "It's my sister." Then to me, "It's dinnertime, and I need to go."
By this point, I was crying with laughter, so I texted him a picture of the shirt he was supposed to get, and he texted back, "That is MUCH BETTER than the one I got."
We hung up, and then, because my husband and daughter were looking at me as if I'd lost my mind, I explained. Chris discovered there was a whole line of ugly werewolf T-shirts, one of which said, "Lock up your wives, the ALPHA is here!" We started joking about sending him werewolf shirts on purpose.
After dinner, I talked to Paul again, and he confirmed that if he'd received the plantfluencer shirt, he'd have at least known it was someone he knew and would have asked who sent it to him.
The story has a happy ending. Amazon refunded me for the shirt and didn't demand we return it, and I just ordered another plant influencer shirt for Paul. I wonder what shirt they'll send this time? Probably the right one, but ... I can't help but hope he gets another ridiculous T-shirt.
Romeo and Juliet by Ford Madox Brown (1870) Is it just me, or is Juliet gritting her teeth? And Romeo's pose is kinda awkward.
Is Romeo and Juliet a romance?
No, it's not.
Many people consider R&J the epitome of romantic stories, and ... well, I think they are wrong. If someone wants to try to convince me that R&J is a romance, I promise I'll listen and hear them out (but I'm unlikely to change my mind). It is certainly a poignant story, but it is a heart-breaking tragedy and not a romance. Hell, its full title is The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.
Seriously, on date night, do you think accidentally killing your partner's kinsman is romantic? Might you consider going no-contact with both families? No? How about getting stranded because of a plague epidemic or committing suicide? Do those sound like a fun and oh-so-romantic followup to a dinner by candlelight?
The death of children has never struck me as especially romantic, perhaps because I've seen the emotional wreckage it leaves behind. Even in the 17th century, Shakespeare's audiences would have been horrified as soon as Juliet's age was revealed and that her mother had been had only been 14 when Juliet was born. The groundlings at the Globe would have been considered Juliet much too young for marriage because a thirteen-year-old was still a pre-pubescent child (in 1600, the average age at menarche was 16).
Pregnancy in young girls was also dangerous as hell because they frequently died in childbirth (perhaps because their pelvises hadn't yet broadened), and infants born to very young mothers were nearly always underweight. In a time when the child mortality rate approached 50%, risking an underweight newborn was asking for trouble, and the Elizabethans knew it. While it's true that on rare occasions, dynastic marriages occurred when the girl was only thirteen, the young couple was typically kept apart until the bride could safely bear a child, usually around the age of 18.
Romeo and Juliet may not be a romance, but it is about love ... and hate. It's a conflict between the individual and the group; two individual kids fall in love, yet their families' hate tragically keeps them apart.
I'm comfortable with calling R&J a love story, though, because there is an important distinction between that and romance, but the terms are not interchangeable. There is dissent, of course, on what counts, but the most commonly agreed-upon modern definition of romance is that it's a story that focuses on the romantic love between the main characters, has at least hope for a happy ending, and the main characters must be in a relationship at the end of the book (you can see how this definition excludes R&J).
A love story is a much broader category, requiring only that love be at least a subplot. It is far more defined by what it doesn't require than what it does; no happy ending is necessary, the main characters don't have to end up together (they might even marry other people), and romantic elements don't have to be the primary focus.
In other words, all romances are love stories, but not all love stories are romances.
The disagreement as to what counts as a romance even extends to theRomance Writers of America (RWA), and whoo-boy, do they have an oddball history, particularly with regard to changing social norms, and their inability to respond to the wishes and needs of their diverse readership. For the last decade or so, they've had egg (or entire omelets) on their face more often than not. I'm not going to address most of the organization's problems here - that's the subject for a term paper or even an MA thesis, but I included a few links at the end if you are interested.
But the RWA, with a stunning lack of awareness, confused love story with romance twice in a six-year period, honoring books featuring genuinely genocidal heroes. Because committing genocide is so, so romantic?
The hell?
In one case, RWA gave one of its prestigious awards to a book that features a hero with a "tortured soul" (it's a common romance trope). He's an American soldier who took part in more than one massacre of Native Americans, including at Wounded Knee. I get that sometimes soldiers get caught up in horrific situations after the shooting starts, but those are tragedies. And no matter how remorseful he is, how can one enjoy his romance and happily ever after against a backdrop of the innocent victims he murdered and the author's condescension toward the victims' religious beliefs?
In the hands of a skilled author, a genocidal soldier might make an interesting protagonist or anti-hero (Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy, I'm looking at you), but a hero of a romantic story? Yeah, no.
In another case, the RWA advanced a book to finalist (in two different categories!) that features an SS officer at a WW2 concentration camp as a hero. The heroine is a Jewish prisoner, and they fall in love; he saves her, she rejects her Judaism, and converts to Christianity. While I don't think the hero needs to be a good man, it's pretty hard to accept one who is committing actual war crimes. The SS officers who ran the camps were evil shits, monstrous in ways the Beast never was in Beauty and the Beast.
There could also never be genuine consent by the heroine, and it's hard to imagine finding the love story between a Stockholm syndrome-suffering victim and an evil genocidal monster in the least bit romantic. And what happy ending is even possible when she knows her lover holds her ethnicity in so much contempt that he is willing to torture and murder people because of it?
It's reasonable to call the novels described above love stories, and I don't doubt they are well-written -- they wouldn't have been finalists or won awards if so -- nor do they lack realism; they strike me as possible, perhaps even probable in real life. I suspect the WW2 love story was inspired by the real-life relationship between Franz Wunsch, an SS guard at Auschwitz, and the Jewish prisoner Helena Citrónová. While she did have feelings for him, they had no happy ending (she married someone else, and he stalked her for years before finally giving up), and at his trial in 1972, she testified that, yes, he had indeed saved her, but that she had also witnessed him committing atrocities.
So, I know I'm gatekeeping a bit, but I'd really prefer that genocidal main characters stay off the romance shelves and stay in the historical fiction lane where they belong. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.
Oh, and did I mention that the RWA regularly passed over highly acclaimed entries by black authors in order to recognize books that featured the deeds of the aforementioned genocidal heroes? Unsurprisingly, the RWA entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May of 2024.
"Recommend a romance book you’ve read to a friend or family member."
I'm not just going to recommend a book, rather, I'm going to recommend Evie Dunmore's four-book series A League of Extraordinary Women.
I've always said that I've learned a lot of history from reading historical romances, and this series is an excellent example of why this is so. They are thoroughly researched, yes, but they were also beautifully written and engaging, and I felt as if I were a silent friend and member of their suffragette chapter, along for their very bumpy ride.
The books are set in Victorian England in the 1880s and chronicle just how convoluted the fight for rights has always been. Some of the more interesting things they cover:
Queen Victoria's own passionate disapproval of women's rights.
Women's suffrage in England (which didn't occur until 36 years after the series begins).
The right of women to own their own property after marriage.
Laws that allowed a husband to have his wife jailed if she decided to live apart from him.
Colonial art theft.
This series covers the lives of four friends who are among the very first women to attend Oxford University and the men they fall in love with. Most of the eight main characters are based on real-life suffragists and their allies who recognized injustice and fought alongside their wives and lovers (you can read about the real people who inspired many of the main characters at the bottom of this page) to help create a world where men and women can be true partners.
I especially loved how the books, which focus on the significant misogyny of the time, never cross the line into misandry. The men (and women) range from good to bad, but nearly everyone falls somewhere in between the extremes. Something that's interesting (and kind of cool) is that all four book titles honor the allies:
Bringing Down the Duke - Suffragette/Country girl Annabelle meets the Duke of Montgomery, Queen Victoria's Tory political strategist. My second favorite of the series.
A Rogue of One's Own - The heroine is more prickly than I like, the hero is a bit too handsome, though that in itself causes some humor. Focuses on a sympathetic eye on sex workers, who the heroine helps on occasion.
Portrait of a Scotsman - My favorite of the series, as the characters come from lower or middle-class beginnings (though they or their families have attained some wealth). This book contains one of the very best grovels I've ever encountered.
The Gentleman's Gambit - Heroine is a linguist and brilliant in her own right. Hero is from the Levant and is interested in returning local artifacts stolen by British colonial powers. The book turns the traditional grovel on its head by having the heroine do the groveling (as was contextually reasonable - she genuinely screwed up).
After she inspired my romance genre paradigm shift, my daughter gave me this fun book for Christmas, and I am enthusiastically planning out the challenges.
First some house rules:
No "already fulfilled the challenge" loopholes. In other words, I can't get a prize for the meet-cute (#1 below) challenge just because I've read many such books already. I must meet the challenge again, with a new book.
No re-reading books to meet the challenge. I must pick something new.
If I really cannot find a book to meet the challenge, I may write a 5000-word (preferably 7000) short story that does meet the criteria.
A book cannot be used to fulfill more than one challenge (unless the challenge encourages you to do so).
Now, the challenges. Numbers 1-15 should be prefaced with "read a romance novel that..." and any of the italicized items can be combined with other challenges, if desired.
Visit your local bookstore and ask for a recommended romance read.
Pretend to be the main character of the book you are reading.
Make a list of ways to enjoy your own company. Complete three.
Write a love letter.
Write a list of ten things you know/feel/believe about love.
Learn 3 things about your ideal romantic destination.
Read a summer romance outside near a body of water.
Watch a movie/show based on a romance book.
Check out three romance novels from your local library.
As I finish each one, I'll add links to their own short posts.
Note: one thing I will not do, is share what the prizes are - I don't want to ruin the mystery, should you buy your own copy (linked above). I also didn't use my Amazon Associates link, so I won't make any money from the link (not that I've ever made any money through that channel).
"Read a romance novel with a protagonist much older than you are."
Well... I'm in my mid-50s, so "much older" means the heroine has to be at least 70 years old, and I wasn't sure how many romance novels exist where that is the case.
Fortunately, some friends recommended a novella by an author I've read before, and liked: Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventureby Courtney Milan.
I liked the book very much. It’s a historical romance that takes place in Victorian England, and the main characters are 73 and 69. The older of the two is quite wealthy, and her nephew and legal heir is a really awful person. He is a leach, living off the promise of inheriting his aunt’s fortune (and given that she is 73, it shouldn’t be far off), refusing to pay his debts (he hasn’t paid his rent in two years, having forged his aunt’s signature on the lease). He even hires prostitutes on the promise of paying them when his aunt dies. Bertrice and Violetta make it their mission to torment him. Madcap adventures ensue.
The story touches on the loss of friends (when one reaches her 70s, she will absolutely have outlived a few loved ones), the lack of power women had at the time, and the fact that being falsely declared incompetent was a real risk. It even touches on NotAllMen (see footnote below), Victorian-style, which was fun. The dialog was wonderful, and there were many beautifully described, funny moments.
The book displays more misandry than I typically prefer -- I like the main male character to be a good man, not a villain. Aside from the Terrible Nephew (that's what they called him), all the other men in the book were extremely minor supporting characters, so that made it feel a little unbalanced. On the other hand, the story was really just about Bertrice, Violetta, and the Terrible Nephew.
I really liked this septuagenarian romance, though it makes me wonder how common lesbian relationships were in Victorian times. I assume they happened, but they must have been pretty dangerous at least until 1967 when Britain partially decriminalized homosexuality. Anyway, a love story is a love story and this one was quite wonderful. I really wanted the main characters to continue on their adventures together.
I also really adored how the author reframed the reader's image of elderly women's bodies from the typical wrinkled and withered to:
"Skin that was dusted with age spots and veined like the finest marble."
"Breasts that time had given a graceful sway."
"Every act of gravity and time made beauty in nature—except when it happened to human women. Not any longer. Ravines carved in her forehead by time made a striking landscape."
Given that my own body has existed for 55 years, these descriptions made me feel appreciated, even admired in a way that most romance novels don't (or haven't in a long time).
The book got me thinking, though, about romance between elderly folks. It's usually handled on TV as something of a joke - the shows Parks and Recreation (episode 5.4 "Sex Education") and New Amsterdam (episode 4.21 "Castles Made of Sand") have both dealt with outbreaks of STDs among elderly populations in nursing homes, and the humor is in no small part based on ridicule and disgust. For some reason, people think old people doing the dirty is HI-LAR-IOUS and that their bodies are - to put it far more kindly than they did - unsexy.
I prefer to think of elderly bodies as scarred by time. Sexual desire doesn't go away just because someone accrues a few extra decades. Neither does our need for friendship, intimacy, cuddling, companionship, and love.
Now that I think about it, movies and TV typically have two modes for love among the elderly - either long-time partners who are about to be parted by death (tragedy) or elderly folks bed-hopping (comedy).
With the former, it's usually (I think?) about the husband losing the wife, which is evidently more compelling, more heartbreaking, than the other way around, possibly because women outlive their husbands far more regularly than the opposite and is somehow less interesting because of that? For the record, I disagree with this sentiment. I was lucky enough to marry my best friend, and chances are that I will outlive him, and well, that feels pretty damn tragic to me.
And with the latter, well, the stories range from condescending ("Aren't these old folks so cute for acting like young people?") to outright jerky (characters pretend to vomit at the idea of sex between the elderly). A particularly egregious example is from the 1971 movie Harold and Maude:
To be fair, the scene, which bothers me in isolation, is much funnier in context, and I appreciate the subtext quite a bit.
I'd really love it if there were more stories that fall in between the two, episodes more like 4.15 "The Benefactor Factor" in TheBig Bang Theory, where Leonard sleeps with an elderly wealthy university donor. Yes, there's some humor at her expense, but it manages to subvert the ridicule in a way that I like, and touches on her loneliness (she is also delightfully snarky toward most of the main characters), and the fact that both participants had a pretty good time in the process.
* While it is absolutely true that not all men are assholes like Bertrice's nephew, either in the book or in real life, the NotAllMen argument is nearly always an obtuse diversion that hands men an out, a reason not to try to change the system. Even good men (of which there are fortunately plenty in this world) still benefit from a system that favors them, and unless they are actively attempting to put an equitable system in place, they are part of the problem. I don't exactly fault them - it's awfully easy for anyone, including me, to look away, to go along to get along. Also - while things are MUCH better than they were in 1867 when the novella takes place, women today still only make 84% of what men do.
Prompt - Four Seasons (400 words): Structure a story based on the four seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. Write 100 words for each season, with the four episodes tying together and leading to a dramatic or thought-provoking conclusion.
***
Winter
Sleet tapped the glass windows, and John Dee shivered with cold on Plough Monday as he re-read his notes on the new principles of cartography he wished to introduce to Queen Bess in his upcoming audience.
Walsingham strolled into his office. “Her Majesty wishes you to be the Official Uncorker of Ocean Bottles.”
Dee started to laugh, but Sir Francis’s eyes lacked mirth. “But … I am a mathematician and map-maker, sir.”
“Her majesty says, ‘Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.’ You have been tested. Those bottles may contain messages from spies.”
Spring
Dee was in the garden, enjoying the first warm spring day, when a royal messenger interrupted him, handing him a very old bottle, like no design he’d ever seen.
Dee sighed, carried the bottle inside to a windowless room, and locked the door behind him. He set to worrying the clay and wax stopper free, extracting the aged-stiffened parchment, and carefully unrolled it.
Greek letters. Interesting.
“Theophrastus… ocean currents …” he translated rustily. Dee pushed a pin into a wall map, marking Greece, writing “2000 yrs” underneath. He placed the bottle on a shelf with the rest of his salt-encrusted collection.
Summer
In the sweltering heat, John Dee sat looking through William Cecil’s atlas of manuscript maps, not allowing a single drop of sweat to land on the lovely collection.
My Lord Burghley, he wrote, the maps appear accurate, excepting the Roanoke and Virginia colonies, which lack proper proportions. I should be glad to draw —
A royal messenger placed a bottle on his desk. “Another one, sir.”
Dee opened the bottle, not allowing the messenger to see the message, and scanned it, picking out a few words of Spanish. “Columbus’s report of Hispaniola.”
“Oh! The New World? Your bottle-message collection is wonderful, sir!”
Autumn
Snow drifted on a frigid breeze across the messenger’s path as he carried a bottle to Dee’s house. Dee met him at the door and eagerly took the bottle.
“Good Yuletide, sir!” the messenger said, following him in.
Dee opened the bottle and read aloud, “The Spanish prepare for war against beloved Gloriana, 1st September 1580. —Drake.” Dee dropped the bottle, and it shattered upon the hearth.
The door slammed open. “’Tis a shame, John,” Walsingham said, leading soldiers inside. “I see I didn’t test you enough.” To his men, he said, “The Tower. And destroy the too-renowned bottle messages.”
Sir Francis Walsingham and William Cecil/Lord Burghley were also real; important advisors to Elizabeth I and sometimes patrons of Dee.
Cecil really did create an atlas of maps, and it is in the Royal Library today.
Elizabeth I supposedly created a position “The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles” in the 1580s believing messages found in bottles washed up on the beach to contain coded spy messages, and it was on pain of death for anyone else to open them. However, this is no evidence of this, nor is there any evidence that John Dee held the position. He also lived to 1608, so even if he was sent to the tower in 1582, he survived the ordeal
Elizabeth considered Sir Francis Drake’s accounts of circumnavigating the earth to be Royal secrets.
Columbus set reports of his findings adrift in bottles
Theophrastus also did in about 300 BC, but as a science experiment, to understand the tides and currents of the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
Coffee beans are spoiled by oxygen, light, heat, and moisture, so storing them in an opaque vacuum canister is a great idea ... in theory. I've tried several different vacuum storage canisters for coffee over the years, and they all suck (pun intended).
They mostly don't hold a vacuum, and it's just all too common to start your coffee routine by finding that the vacuum canister has equalized overnight, exposing your beans to at least oxygen and humidity. Some of that can be explained by fresh beans giving off CO2, so the vessel may be filling carbon dioxide (harmless) and not oxygen, but the vast majority of outgassing is done 3 days post-roasting ... and I regularly find broken seals weeks after roasting. Sometimes bits of bean build up on the gaskets, breaking the seal, but even regular cleaning didn't solve it.
So for years, I've used the Airscape canister, which was one of the best solutions inexpensive solutions out there, and it works by using a valved collapsing lid (it's the equivalent of squeezing all the air out of a plastic bag), which reduces the volume of air that comes into contact with the beans. I kept a week's worth of beans in the Airscape and stored the rest of my coffee in canning jars that I vacuum-sealed with a jar sealer. Canning lids and rings tended to hold a vacuum reasonably (but not perfectly) reliably.
Fortunately, Fellow recently released a coffee storage solution that doesn't suck, their electric Atmos canister (it's battery-operated and only needs charging every couple of months). It's super easy to use. You push a button, and it vacuums itself closed. Push it again, and the vacuum releases so you can get the lid off. And best of all, it monitors the pressure in the canister and automatically adjusts should the pressure change inside.
I've been using mine for several months, and I'm delighted with it. It keeps my current bag of coffee fresher than the Airscape, but it's not cheap ($75-$85 depending on size) but it does a really good job. Whenever I put a fresh bag of coffee inside, I brush down the rubber gaskets, and along the inside/top of the canister to prevent bean bits from interfering with the seals. The top section contains electronic equipment so it's strictly wipe-down only. No running water, and definitely no dishwasher. But I'm finding that it doesn't need much cleaning anyway.
The bigger size is good if you tend to buy your coffee in 1-pound bags (454g), and the smaller will hold 12-ounce bags (340g).
