August 2024 – Whoopsie Piggle

Every Sunday morning a report appears on my phone. It tells me the average time I spent looking at my phone each day over the prior week, which, until recently, was around three hours. Wow, you might think, that’s a lot of screen time, and I would agree. However, the majority of that time was spent reading news and analysis.

Broadcast television pieces are too short for in-depth reporting, while cable news channels — both conservative and liberal — are repetitive and patently skewed to partisan emotions. Instead, I listen to NPR and read multiple publications that are well rated by the independent media watchdog, Ad Fontes Media.

I start each morning with newsletters from both the left-leaning New York Times and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal. Comparing their daily headlines — which reveals what is most important to their respective audiences — as well as the differences in coverage of any issue or event, is insightful.

Throughout the day, other newsletters appear in my email inbox from both publications, as well as from the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the Akron Beacon Journal and Signal. I signed up for most of these during Trump’s presidency. Between Trump’s unconventional everything and the first pandemic in a century, I went from a well-informed voter to someone who consumed news like I was drinking from a fire hose.

Then, a few months after Biden’s inauguration, a shift occurred. Politics quieted down and vaccinations for COVID rolled out, reducing the risk of contracting the virus. Life slowly began to feel less chaotic and dangerous and my daily news consumption dropped from full-blast fire-hose to a two-liter bottle consumed in sips. This allowed me to rediscover the pleasure of listening to music and reading books.

I’ve enjoyed reading in bed at day’s end since childhood. I was one of those kids who’d surreptitiously read under the covers with a flashlight. But let’s be real, nowadays my head starts to bob two pages into any reading after 8 p.m. This is why I also began to read books in the morning before getting out of bed and while eating lunch. Before long, an ineffable shift soon occurred. I became less anxious about the state of the world and more able to let go of things I cannot control.

However, starting in 2022, national politics once again became as impossible to turn away from as a 100-car train wreck. Eye-popping Supreme Court decisions, a presidential race that was setting up to be a replay of the last one until, whoah, that June debate, an assassination attempt of the former president and then the history-making changes of the Democratic ticket. Whew! Remember at the beginning of the year when I wrote that this would be a strap-on-your-seatbelts year in politics? What an understatement.

Having recently lived through dramatic times, when I found myself once again reading multiple takes on every issue from the economy to reproductive and voting rights to climate change to education and more, I quickly questioned if this was necessary. Ok, maybe a yes on education. But for all other topics, I am once again limiting my intake, which feels healthy. While being an informed citizen is critically important, my ability to change the trajectory of current policy and history is limited. No matter one’s political perspective, an excessive consumption of news only serves to aggravate the consumer.

This summer I resumed my effort to balance my reading diet with more books. My 14-year-old son, Leif, and I started our own two-person book club. I picked “Parable of the Sower” because I love Octavia Butler and he likes science fiction. A post-apocalyptic novel with a protagonist who is Leif’s age, “Parable of the Sower” is more grim than I expected, yet Leif did not want to stop reading it when I gave him the option.

To keep myself from sliding back to over-reading news stories, I’ve assigned myself a book a week. Separate from my mother-son book club, I’m enjoying “Confederacy of Dunces,” a book long recommended to me by many. And while my home has piles of unread books, I’m tempted to buy more from the New York Times’s recently published list of the best 100 books of the 21st century, particularly “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver, another favorite author of mine.

Reading good books may not directly change the state of affairs. But it does give one’s brain a break, which is important at a time when it is easy to get worked up about everything everywhere all at once. And in that break, fresh perspectives might take root and grow. Now if only there was a way to receive a book-reading report at the end of each week.

This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, August 15, 2024.

Nothing can change how a space makes people feel more easily than color. Industrial-organizational psychologists research how color affects mood in institutions from prisons to hospitals to schools. Long ago, the Chinese developed feng shui, an art form that employs a nine-block color grid (or bagua) to create optimal balance and harmony in spaces. But until the 1990s few Americans painted interior walls anything but shades of white.

Today, most paint companies have so many colors, picking one can feel overwhelming. Applying the feng shui bagua can reduce options and, thereby, stress. So can an old Martha Stewart tip: choose colors from an item, say a painting or textile, you find pleasing. The Middle Eastern rug in my office guided my choices for that room’s walls and floor.

But remember that light can be a trickster. Online, a brown-beige I picked looked similar to the color of paper grocery bags. On the walls it made the room look like the inside of a cantaloupe. Fortunately, it took only a day and $100 of new paint to change the room from fruit- to nut-colored.

Painting the exterior of a home is far more expensive than a room, adding importance, and anxiety, to choosing colors. Last summer I received bids to paint my home between $6,000 and $7,000, plus materials. I needed the winter to save up the funds and consider my options.

Plank-width aluminum siding was installed over the original clapboard easily 50 years ago. I wanted to remove it, but feared it might trigger a cascade of necessary repairs. For instance, I know from photos that the back door was moved from the corner to the center of the back wall. A sheet of plywood might be all that covers the old doorway under the aluminum siding. To prevent budget-busting surprises, the siding stayed.

Claire Cressler lived in the home with his wife, Gloria, for nearly 70 years. When we became next-door neighbors in 2003, he was a long-retired artist and widower and the house was ochre with black trim. After Claire died in 2008, his estate attorney decided to upgrade the 1903 home before selling it. Sadly, the original slate roof was torn off to make way for asphalt shingles. But on the plus side, an energy-efficient gas furnace replaced a mid-century cylindrical gravity furnace that operated similarly to a stove. It had a metal door that was so large, the first time I saw it I recalled how Hansel and Gretel outsmarted the candy-house witch.

The attorney also had the house painted a light teal green with cream trim, but the young couple who bought the home decided it should be a darker shade of teal, which they painted themselves. However, they could not reach the peak under the roof in the front and decide not to bother painting the back of the house, except for where they’d trialed the darker color around the back door.

The house remained like this for the decade I’ve owned it until last summer, when I bought tiny jars of paint and sampled colors on both sunny and shady sides of the house. (The cantaloupe surprise taught me well.) The previous owners’ efforts combined with my color testing resulted in a multi-toned hodgepodge on the back and south sides of the house. It looked like a Disney monster (Mad Madam Mim, perhaps) with a polychromatic pox and I winced in my car each time I rounded the corner of my street.

When spring arrived, I was grateful I hadn’t had the cash on hand last year because after a year of seeing the sampled sections, I no longer wanted those colors. Instead, I fell victim to a current trend seen across the country: I had the entire house painted dark blue (Hague Blue by Farrow & Ball). Instead of white trim, as is often used on dark blue homes, I chose Farrow & Ball’s Cooking Apple Green, a warm cream with a hint of green that complements the blue.

Magic Painters, a family-owned company I have used before on interior projects, spent a week metamorphosing my home. They did not use a sprayer, as was done 15 years ago, but painted every inch by hand, two coats. Protected by storm windows screwed into the exterior frame, the three original bay windows on the first floor were not painted 15 years ago and remained black. My painters removed the storm windows, re-caulked the sash windows, painted them Cooking Apple Green and washed all the glass, leaving nary a smudge.

The transformation of my home simply by having it painted is delightfully satisfying. Each time my children and I pull onto our street, even now, two months later, someone in the car comments on just how wonderful it looks.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, August 4, 2024.