Sometimes, the way people see us is not the person we are inside. We may appear idiotic, unattractive (I refuse to use the word "ugly" because it is such a mean, nasty word), even pointless. 

We may seem that way because we are just so bad at human interaction. We'd be better off never having to be around other people and yet we actually do like them. What we end up doing is not always what we set out to do. We try to fake it until we make it and often come up short.

I used to think having good intentions was enough but now I realize that's just not true. People aren't mind readers, they only have our actions to go by. 

They don't know the reason we might not be able to talk coherently with them is because we like them, not because we don't. It's always been hard for me to grasp (and frustrating) that the more I care about someone or something, the more I tend to flub what I most want to go well.

Terrified of saying something stupid, we can avoid them completely and be rude without meaning to be. There are occasions when it feels like I have lost the will to try with certain people because I realize (hopefully, not too late) that they just don't care for me and we are never going to be friends. I learned in high school the horrible consequences of trying too hard to win someone over.

Ever since I was a little girl I've been most comfortable away from others. Teachers tried to help and my parents were always telling me to stop reading and go out and play. I didn't like the real world, only the one in between the pages of a book.

When I was about ten years old, my grandfather put a copy of Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends & Influence People in my hands. Whether breaking out into Elvis songs or grabbing an unsuspecting dance partner out on the floor, he had a way about him that suggested there was no one he was not comfortable being around, at home or parties. He could have written the book himself.

I didn't want to disappoint him so I did end up reading it, though I honestly don't think it helped much. I don't want to "win" friends or influence anyone. I just want to feel comfortable around people and not have to fake a way past my shyness, which I still have to this day.
  
(p.s. By "we," I really mean me. Most people I know have their acts together and if they don't they're doing a great of job of pretending they do.)

Sunday odds and ends, throughout the day...and on Monday

Who knew there is a small subset of self-help books that focus on using parallel universe theory to greatly improve your life? 

As hokey as it sounds it's definitely not boring...and (if it were real and worked) would be kind of nice to channel the positive aspects of an alternate version of you into this you. Instead of wondering whether there is another you somewhere out in the universe, you could be the person here.

I'm a bit ashamed to say I bought this for my Kindle, but the quantum physics-fascinated part of me just had to...and the part that likes to think somewhere I'm getting it right better than I am here. I

It's too soon to say good things, though. The author is using lots of science, but so far real world application of this seems pretty flimsy.




From the 2014 Fall Season Preview in the Wall Street Journal:

"I love to cry, and I love music that makes me really vulnerable. I like coming out of a show feeling ripped into a million pieces. When music can do that, then it's just an amazing thing."-Laurie Anderson

http://online.wsj.com/articles/35-new-yorkers-share-their-fall-arts-entertainment-picks-1411078936


Sunday turned out to be a busy day and I still haven't read the papers, but I am excited about some of the new tv shows ("Gotham" airs tonight at 8 on Fox), though these reviews make they seem "iffy."(I do love this part of the review for "NCIS: New Orleans;" it's absolutely true>>Scott Bakula is one of our great underrated TV resources.)

 http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/fall-tv-reviews-scorpion-forever-ncis-new-orleans

For more reviews, including one for "Gotham," read here:

 http://www.tvguide.com/News/New-Fall-TV-Season-Reviews-Gotham-Sleepy-Hollow-Forever-Scorpion-1087342.aspx

'But it wasn't safe to have dreams like that...that hurt too much, that cut to the quick in all the wrong places. The futility, the hopelessness of it banged like a cymbal inside her skull.'-Randy Salem

If you take away the horrible title and the oddly positioned figures on the cover, you've got the potential for a great book in The Sex Between. If you visit websites like Strange Sisters you'll notice that dozens upon dozens of lesbian pulp fiction titles were published in the 50s and 60s, most of them with the most outrageously lurid covers you could ever imagine, many of them actually written by straight men rather than genuine lesbians. If you go to the Kindle store, you'll also note that just a fraction of those have survived as bona fide worthwhile reads, written by women who truly understood what it meant to be gay in an era that condemned them as "perverts" or worse.

Though Randy Salem's T.S.B. is not the best "pulp fiction" I've read, it certainly is not the worst...and better yet, it speaks to the experience of being so different in the time of "love that dare not speak its name." I'm not sure which surprises me more about this book...the fact that the cover does not speak to its contents at all or that there is a happy ending. Maybe, in some way, the cover art was meant to throw people off from the fact neither woman is doomed to a life of unhappiness? I doubt it, but surely back then publishers did their best to titillate rather than educate readers on what it's actually like being gay.

Here Randy Salem introduces you to Lee and Maggie, two women who have known each other pretty much their entire lives yet have never told each other how they really feel. Lee, older and supposedly wiser, is sure Maggie would never return her feelings so she tries to be as content as possible with their roommate situation. Maggie also helps Lee with secretarial work and they live a fairly comfortable life together as friends and employer/employee. Lee is a love 'em and leave 'em type girl while Maggie has never been in love or in any kind of relationship, physical or otherwise.

Lee may be a jerk to all the other women in her life, but to Maggie she is quietly devoted, suffering in love from afar. Maggie looks up to Lee and discreetly manages to keep the chaos in Lee's life from snowballing. Only when intense meddling, in the form of family matriarch Kate, comes storming into their lives do things take a dramatic turn. What seems like tragedy that can only be met with futile resistance becomes so much more...with Lee and Maggie discovering things about themselves and family dynamics that are both terrifying and life-changing.

Having found much more substance and reflection in this genre by Ann Bannon or Sloane Britain, I couldn't quite warm to this 100 percent...nevertheless its ending had its own kind of power and Randy Salem chose wisely in having both characters become more than just stereotypes. 

Bad title and out-of-place cover aside (Maggie is nothing like the brunette on the cover), The Sex Between definitely deserved to be "rescued" by Cleis Press. The way each woman feels about the other and how everyone in their lives disapproves and tries to demonize their love deeply spoke to me, both the first and second time I read the novel.

You could ask what need is there these days for such books, but I'd have to counter: we very much still live in a world where gay people are demonized and lesbians suffer in silence with no family or friends to talk about things like this.

iTunes is currently giving away U2's new album Songs Of Innocence for free. Apple received a lot of flack for automatically placing it in the "purchased" section of every iTunes account holder.

Though I can understand the upset at such a presumptuous move, I am thoroughly enjoying the music. Amidst all the outrage and assumptions that something free can't possibly be any good are glowing reviews like the one below from Rolling Stone.

I have to say I think the album is their best in years! It's consistently good throughout, not at all spotty...lots of beauty shines through the Innocence.

No other rock band does rebirth like U2. No other band – certainly of U2's duration, commercial success and creative achievement – believes it needs rebirth more and so often. But even by the standards of transformation on 1987's The Joshua Tree and 1991's Achtung! Baby, Songs of Innocence – U2's first studio album in five years – is a triumph of dynamic, focused renaissance: 11 tracks of straightforward rapture about the life-saving joys of music, drawing on U2's long palette of influences and investigations of post-punk rock, industrial electronics and contemporary dance music. "You and I are rock & roll," Bono shouts in "Volcano," a song about imminent eruption, through a propulsive delirium of throaty, striding bass, alien-choral effects and the Edge's rusted-treble jolts of Gang of Four-vintage guitar. Bono also sings this, earlier in a darker, more challenging tone: "Do you live here or is this a vacation?" For U2, rock & roll was always a life's work – and the work is never done.--David Fricke

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/u2-songs-of-innocence-20140911#ixzz3DnYW6xLp
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

"Song For Someone" is especially wonderful...it's just so lovely I can't stop listening.

"Song For Someone"

You've got a face not spoiled by beauty
I have some scars from where I've been
You've got eyes that can see right through me
You're not afraid of anything they've seen

I was told that I would feel
Nothing the first time
I don't know how these cuts heal
But in you I found a right

If there is a light
You can always see
And there is a world
We can always be
If there is a dark
That we shouldn't doubt
And there is a light
Don't let it go out

And this is a song
A song for someone
This is a song
A song for someone

You let me into a conversation
A conversation only we could make
You're breaking into my imagination
Whatever's in there is yours to take

I was told I'd feel
Nothing the first time
You were slow to heal
But this could be the night

If there is a light
You can always see
And there is a world
We can always be
If there is a dark
Within and without
And there is a light
Don't let it go out

And this is a song
A song for someone
This is a song
A song for someone

And I'm a long way
From your hill on Calvary
And I'm a long way
From where I was, where I need to be

If there is a light
You can always see
And there is a world
We can always be
If there is a kiss
I stole from your mouth
And there is a light,
Don't let it go out

I was very wary of downloading the recently released iOS8 on to my iPhone 5s tonight, but now that the process is over I have no regrets. It took over an hour and a half to get it all working, but I didn't lose a thing (this has not always been the case with previous updates) so that's a huge plus right there!

What I like most (so far) is the Podcast app that automatically appeared. I've never done Podcasts before and became curious right away. I chose one with an Anjelica Huston interview from the Pittsburgh Hear and Now Show. (She's such a neat and nice lady and strikes me as very genuine and very intelligent. And when she talks of her late husband you can so hear the love in her voice.)

Then I discovered a Podcast all about Todd Haynes's cult film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. I'm listening to it right now and it's not just about the movie itself (made with Barbie dolls in the late 80s and so eerie and sad I find it almost unbearable to watch) but about Karen herself...and her voice.

That podcast is called The Lost Picture Show with two British gents named John and Julian, one of whom loves the Carpenters as much as any Carpenters fan possibly can and the other for whom there could be very few tortures worse than listening to their music.

http://thelostpictureshow.com/

It may be nice to have podcasts to listen to late at night when it's hard to keep your eyes open, but  you're still awake anyway and the sound of a soothing voice gives you the illusion of not being alone.

I can't wait to discover and learn more.