2020 Hindsight: The books and the people and the bird

It has been very frustrating in this phase of my life finding that I can't write as much or listen to music as much, but the big comfort is that I have been able to keep up pretty well with my reading, even if I am slower.

Blogger was the biggest help in reviewing my decade, but Goodreads stats played a role.

I joined Goodreads in late 2008, around the same time I joined Facebook, and from that point on it is easy to see how much I was reading, and what.

(For some fun Goodreads stats, in 2009 I only read five books, but they were really long ones that took a long time, including War and Peace. I also recently checked and found that I added 135 books to my Want to Read list in 2019. This may be why that list does not shrink even while my Read list goes up.)

For the decade, it was right in 2010 that I did my first Black History and Native American Heritage months. That was only four books for each, but it may have got me started with more focused reading, and the overall book counts increased. That really took off with the Long Reading List in 2014.

That was a response to trying to help depressed teenagers. I worried about not knowing what I was doing and not knowing enough about mental health and eating disorders. I just started researching. I wanted them to be okay, and maybe that required me being okay too, so I worked on that. A lot of the goals that I set came from that.

That first Black History month came from a Facebook comment, and then Native American Heritage reading seemed important for balance, and hey, there was already a month for that: perfect! I didn't know that I would also find months for Hispanic Heritage and Asian Pacific American Heritage. I wasn't reviewing bands or doing daily songs yet, so I didn't know that I would start including music and bringing all of that together. I did not know that in the last year of the decade I would be looking for ways to make sure there was queer representation and representation of disability, but that was the natural path.

(I did not know that I would never be on schedule, but that would have been the most predictable part.)


I can point to a lot that came from depressed teenagers, and they largely came via My Chemical Romance. I have said before that my intersectional feminism started with comics. I have remembered now that isn't completely true either. It started with a television writer. I got onto Twitter because that's where all of the Grimm people were, and I really liked that show. One night - I had been on Twitter for about two months - Akela Cooper tweeted about a Black kid who was murdered in Florida, heading back to his father's house after going to get some snacks.

Trayvon Martin's death hit hard. It also led to a new way of interacting and getting news and learning things.

So I wrote out all of my pain and my anger with the world for six months, and then suddenly discovered a lot of other hurting people, and starting interacting with them and reading to find ways to help them, but also reading to better understand race and politics and other things.

They connect in ways you wouldn't expect. It was taking a class on Gender in Comics that gave me resources when one person was questioning gender. I've only needed them for one person, but that time it was important, and I'm glad I was there.

It has changed me as a person. I don't even know that it has made me more caring or kind; I was pretty caring and kind before. The big change is more what I can't forget, that there are things going on that I could have ignored before, or at least explained away, but now I can't.

And that is largely because of Twitter, with a big assist from the Washington County Library system.

When people complain about social media, they definitely have points. Twitter does have too many Nazis and they are not good about handling abuse and they really do keep getting in the way of meaningful interactions as they try and put more ads in front of your eyeballs. It has still brought me into a greater awareness, and even into friendships.

Twitter is why I go to small shows and some of the musicians recognize me. Well, it's the reviews too, but they know about them because of Twitter.

So maybe my really significant decade end will be in 2022, when I have spent a full decade on Twitter. It is still a gift.