Status Update: Pause Between Hustles

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What happened was that, last week, a large job I'd offered to do, and then forgotten about, suddenly leaped out of the e-mail and grabbed me. It was a fun job, or would have been if I'd been in less of a hurry to get it done.  It's the hurrying that's left me feeling frazzled. 

Well, that and the ominous implications of a piece of mail that came in last week. It may have been an error or a prank, but I actually received a notice in the mail that my voting place had been changed to a town I've never even visited, about eighty miles from mine. I wonder how many people in my town, who are sufficiently disgusted with the current administration to vote for everybody with an R beside the name on the ballot, will be confused enough to fail to vote because of this kind of shenanigans? As a guess, a typical reaction will be: "Bah humbug, they don't really count the votes by hand any more anyway and the computers are all rigged, so why bother going into town to straighten this out." 

I'll be going into town to find out more about this caper, and blog and tweet about it, in the morning. Then I have one more Book Tasters e-book, two actual physical books, a Plough e-book, and at least one Library Thing e-book (the system prods the authors to send them out at the end of the month) to read and review or, in one case, copy-edit. 

I intend to spend the next week mostly online, but reading, not writing, with only a little time for the e-mail and Blogspot reading lists. That will not preclude research and writing for the hard-hitting post about election chicanery, or other animal posts and fun stuff. 

Meanwhile, for those looking for something to get up and, if not dance, exercise to...I wondered what Malcolm Dalglish was up to these days. Well, he wasn't derailed by the 1980s' shift from an interest in fusion to an interest in monotonous robotic back-beats and all-but-strip-dancing videos. Here he's set a poem to a traditional dance tune and got a youth choir singing it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2EtUioAYLw

I love it when people aren't trying to make money performing for the music industry, but just enjoying music for what it is. 

Do the Hustle

Busy busy busy...I have a theory about the mostly misunderstood psychology of middle-aged people, sometimes known as "middlescents." That theory is: what being "in love" is to the young, being "busy" is to the middle-aged. We wail and moan about the challenges of sustaining the mood we naturally prefer to stay in, but it's a blissful wailing and moaning, underneath. 'Tis better to have been busy and lost than never to have been busy at all.

I thought it was time for a hard-hitting post with a lot of research in it, after two fluffy animal posts back to back. I've been busy reading, writing, typing, editing, and compiling, all of writers' favorite things. I did not get that research done.

But I did find the recording of the classic dance tune, "Do the Hustle." Here. 

To keep my metabolism ticking properly while working at a desk job with little physical movement in it, I take every opportunity to read an e-friend's blog and discover a music link in it as an obligation to get up and dance. Readers who are in a place where listening to music isn't rude and dancing isn't positively dangerous, which is the kind of place to which I think the Internet should be confined, are invited to apply this rule to reading my blog.

This web site has a commitment not to post memory-hogging videos that might crash some of the devices some Gentle Readers use. To this I've added a new commitment to post a nice mix of links to different kinds of music. 

It's a new concept in DJ'ing. You're at home with your computer, nobody's going to say your selection is less parent-repellently "cool" than the Jones kids', and nobody's judging whether your moves are worthy of the Ballet Russe or evidence that you've not been sticking to that workout routine the doctor gave you. You do not have to be familiar with the musical genre to which you're moving. 

You can do strictly upper body movements in a wheelchair--who's to care, or know? 

You can drape a newspaper over the computer screen if it feels as if the person in the picture on the album cover is looking at you from the screen. 

You can interpret a song in an athletic way, with high kicks, full body bends, and flips, or in an early-rehab way, with rhythmic toe wiggles and pauses to rest between tunes. 

I'll never know. I'll never tell.

I'll only say that some e-friends, like Rob Kistner and Priscilla Bird, have been DJ'ing at their blogs longer than I have and often provide a whole half-hour or hour of aerobically stimulating tunes, and if you're doing your exercise at home you might want to discover them for that reason.

Book Review: P.S. I Loathe You

Title: P.S. I Loathe You

Author: Lisi Harrison

Date: 2p09

Publisher; Little Brown

ISBN: 978-0-316-00680-11

Length: 208 pages

Quote: “We swore off boys for ten whole days, / But it didn’t work so well…Now we’re back in the groove. / Sisters, lock up your brothers!”

By this point in the Clique series, Lisi Harrison and her fans were getting to know all of the Clique girls, not only Massie, the obscenely rich and unfortunately pretty Queen Bee, and Claire, the awkward but teen-starlet-pretty Wannabee. There’s also Alicia, who not so secretly wants to displace Massie, and Kristen, who might actually like Claire’s other friend Layne better even if Massie has ruled her “Layme,” and Dylan, who’s really a better match for the boy Massie’s been “dating” grade-eight style. In this installment each girl is trying to stake her claim to one of the Briarwood boys and, though each girl likes a different boy, their relationships are all so nebulous, so grade eight, that each girl manages to feel jealous of at least one of the others as a possible rival for something that does not actually exist. But it might; the boys are sheltered little social climbers too, and the boys’ and girls’ prep schools do lots of official things together, so each girl can potentially end up chatting and swapping junkfood with her choice of the boys’ soccer team.

Meanwhile, for extra drama, the Pretty Committee decide to become a cheerleading squad. This allows them to recruit a few classmates to fill out the squad (Massie’s Rule #1: “Obey what I say”) and act out their relationship dramas, with the boys and with one another, in front of an audience for maximum comedy effect.

I will say that I’ve liked this series better since reading the volume where Harrison revealed that her original idea was to make fun of some adult co-workers who acted like a junior high school clique. So there is a point, and so, though Claire is the most relatable of these horrible children, she’s not meant to be a role model. Thank you for clarifying that, Lisi Harrison.

I still think middle schoolers in search of a fast-reading series are better off with the Baby-Sitters Club. Seriously. The Baby-Sitters’ relationships may take place on a Lost Planet of Nice where everyone is much nicer than humans normally are, but at least every volume of that series gave the characters a positive, useful tip for something real teenagers do.

This Is Not Today's Post

This is merely a notice that today's blog post has been delayed. It is expected to arrive here by 3 p.m. 

The Professional Confusers

Although I started "gardening" at age six (along with everyone else in Mrs. Fats' first grade class, except a few people who were already bragging of having reached age seven) it would not have occurred to me to describe myself as a Master Gardener. Nor would I have ever expected to find myself correcting a Master Gardener's mistakes.

Nevertheless, no less a newspaper than the Kingsport Times-News allowed one of the Master Gardeners to disgrace perself, anonymously, as follows:

"Q. Master Gardeners, I have black and gold caterpillars with white dots crawling all over webs in my barberry bushes. Are they...pests? I have seen this before...but not to this extent so I have never given it much attention. They've all but decimated the bushes this year. You could actually hear the munching..."

"A. These beasts are tent caterpillars and they are a common pest in Tennessee every year. They form web-like tents around the junctions of tree branches where the eggs hatch and become voracious caterpillars that can completely defoliate young trees and shrubs. Fortunately, they only visit and eat once a year during August here in Tennessee."  

Whew. Where do I begin? 

With the observation that confusing any Master Gardener to this extent is the work of a true career professional in confusion. That is what caterpillars are. It is what they have to be if they want to live. Mostly, in their dim unconscious way, they do want to live; and so, in a variety of unconscious and involuntary ways, they are confusing. Their main focus is on confusing birds but they will happily confuse humans if they get a chance. 

Tent caterpillars belong to the genus Malacosoma in the family Lasiocampidae. Though not so large as some of the Sphingids and Saturnids, they look large compared to the caterpillars the reader was describing. There are a few different species (how many depends on which authority we consult) but only M. americana, or americanum or americanus, again depending on whose book we're reading, is much of a nuisance in eastern Tennessee. Most tent caterpillars do build their tents around forks in the branches of tall fruit trees, where it's harder for enemies to reach them and easier for them to reach the juiciest new leaves. They do most of their munching, in Tennessee, in April. Arguably they become even more of a nuisance in May, when they stop eating and wander about underfoot. They are never observed in August.

What this reader was describing belong to the genus Hyphantria in the family Arctiidae. It used to be believed that there were two distinct species of these caterpillars, Spring and Fall Webworms; now it seems to be agreed that they're different color variations, possibly from distinct bloodlines but still basically the same animal, H. cunea, or Webworms. People are more likely to see green and yellow ones with little black dots in May or June, black or dark brown ones with yellow and white markings in August or September. At the Cat Sanctuary we generally see the green and yellow ones in July and August. They form much thinner tents around the ends of branches, enclosing the leaves, on low bushes. They don't often defoliate the host plant, but they can, especially in a bad-weather year like 2022. 

Other species vary a bit but Malacosoma americana is a fascinating study in adaptation to its environment, and in what looks like warmhearted, loyal, loving behavior in a coldblooded animal with hardly anything in the way of brain. Despite these caterpillars' alarming behavior during their regularly recurring "plague years," they are part of eastern North America's natural environment and, overall, they do nobody any harm. North American trees are built to survive one complete defoliation, by late frosts or voracious caterpillars, with little effect even on the fruit crop. 

The population of Malacosoma americana follows a ten- to twelve-year cycle. Having few natural predators, because their preferred diet of leaves from trees in the genus Prunus fills their bodies with so much cyanide their skins even turn bluish, the insects multiply every year until they become overcrowded. Then they eat things they would not normally eat and become vulnerable to various caterpillar diseases, none of which they seem to share with humans, and the local population level crashes. And so it goes, year after year. The animals don't have enough sense to practice birth control, so nature takes care of that for them.

Hyphantria cunea don't have conspicuous population boom-and-bust cycles. Their population levels, and thus the chance of their being perceived as a nuisance, depend largely on the weather. In the southern tier of States there are two or three generations a year, and the spring Webworms can and do eat enough spring leaves to affect summer harvests. Fall Webworms are harmless since the leaves they eat were about to dry out and drop off the bushes anyway.

Webworms that are close to pupation may be a little over an inch, sometimes a full 3 centimeters long. Tent caterpillars that are close to pupation are about two inches long, twice the size of Webworms. Their tents are bigger and more solid, too, and they live in bigger trees. 

So how is confusion of these unrelated animals even possible? Because caterpillars are confusing little beasts. They're not big, strong, smart, or fast. They have to have something, for survival purposes. One thing they have is confusion. Hyphantria cunea is not very toxic to birds, snakes, lizards, or mice that might want to eat it. Dark H. cunea do, however, mimic M. americana. 

And also we've not had the dark Webworms in this part of the world before. 

When people aren't expecting dark Fall Webworms, even pictures of the little mimics can be confused with pictures of Tent Caterpillars. Especially if they're blurry cell phone photos.

This is the Eastern Tent Caterpillar. Basically a black animal at all stages of its caterpillar life, it shows a white stripe down the middle of the back of its second skin, and shows that halo of ginger fur in its final caterpillar skin. The blue spots are a Lasiocampid specialty. If you wanted to hasten the population bust without watching the caterpillars crawl around suffering, such that you wound the tent around a rake or a stick and dropped it into a fire, you'd notice the caterpillars giving off a strong, bitter scent and burning with a blue flame. They are peaceable little animals who show aggressive behavior only when they seem to be in great pain, and aren't capable of doing any harm when they do try to bite...but they can do some serious damage to predators that actually eat them.

And so a number of other caterpillars, each of whom normally has a different look, find a survival advantage in looking just a little bit more like tent caterpillars.

Here's a typical assortment of Dreaded Gyps, Lymantria dispar. Only during this presidential administration does anyone but me seem to have noticed that, although first and second instar caterpillars of this species are notorious hitchhikers, their traditional English name is a bit of an insult to the various European tribes who call themselves Gypsies. The best way to kill this pest species is to collect and destroy their eggs, which are laid in clumps that look like very small sponges with a lot of fur stuck to them. So the new name for the species is "spongy moths." 

"Gypsy moths" had a variety of overtones. The "Gypsy step" in dancing is often explained as "holding onto your partner with only your eyes," and the caterpillars' big heads are often mistaken for big eyes. The Gypsy step is the most flirtatious part of the dance that includes it. Who wants to feel flirtatious about creepy-crawlies? Whereas...consider the overtones of "spongy." The caterpillars don't feel like sponges when touched--they're quite definitively "cold prickles"--but then there's sponging, or spunging, the detestable practice of hanging out at someone else's house in order to soak up food and drink, climate control, and other utilities which the "sponger" never invites the host to share at the sponger's house in return. Consider the sound of the word. If not "spongy," I think "sponger moth" is likely to catch on as a name for these unlovable creatures.

Anyway, what color is a normal gyp, or sponger? They start out black with white fur. Their second skins show the blue spots or warts on the thorax and red ones on the abdomen. Otherwise the skin usually looks black or grey, from a decent distance. If you get closer than most people want to get to the caterpillars you can see that the skin is speckled and can include light brown or green as well as black and grey speckles. Males, who will be less than half the size of their mates as moths, may be just an inch long and still look black when they pupate. Females, who spend more time being caterpillars and grow bigger, can develop final caterpillar skins in a variety of colors and patterns...

...and in places where Eastern Tent Caterpillars live, you'll find female gyps, or spongies, with blackish skin, ginger fur, and thin, pale imitations of the tent caterpillars' white dorsal stripe. These caterpillars are typically a little longer and considerably thicker than real Eastern Tent Caterpillars.

They imitate Eastern Tent Caterpillars' behavior, too, in a superficial way. Eastern Tent Caterpillars are very social insects, if they defoliate their tree they'll migrate as a family, with the eldest caterpillars leading the way (not that they seem to know where they're going) and the middle-sized ones nudging the youngest ones to follow the eldest one's trails. Their survival depends on the daily grooming sessions when they all congregate at their tent and pick dust and dirt out of each other's fur. Only in the last couple of days before they pupate do Eastern Tent Caterpillars get tired of hanging out with their siblings all the time, and wander around looking for attractive strangers to pupate beside. Spongeys have no such family ties; they disperse immediately after hatching, don't build tents, and don't groom one another. They do, however, learn that there are survival advantages in resting close together, on a mat of silk if possible,  near a fork in a tree.

This is what everyone in Virginia and Tennessee knows Webworms look like: 

...except in place where they might benefit from confusion with tent caterpillars. In addition to the yellow-green form we know so well, there's a fluffy white form and a dark drab form...and then there's this confusion-seeking form: 

Though the Spongies have stiffer, scratchier hair than the Eastern Tent Caterpillars' and Webworms' soft fur, all three species are basically harmless little furballs. The caterpillar below is not harmless. Its bristling spines each pack about as much venom as a bee sting.

Its genus, Hemileuca, has been tentatively divided into about two dozen species. Nobody seems too positive about how distinct these species really are. Hemileuca can look very different while they all seem to be the same sort of thing; conspicuous differences can appear among litter mates. All the caterpillars look nasty, and they are, and several other little animals get some survival benefit from looking like Hemileuca larvae, a.k.a. stingingworms.

Nevertheless, these young stingingworms are getting some benefit from looking ever so slightly like tent caterpillars.

Priscilla Wants to Go to the Dogs

Oh yes you do know what this post is about. Although "go to the dogs" sometimes means "collapse," in U.S. English, like a house that slowly falls in so that the dogs can walk right into whatever is left of it, in this case you know from last week's post that this is the post in which we use the old "search engines know what you want" meme to lead up to some pictures of dogs "named" Priscilla who want homes.

So, izzy wizzy, let's get busy. Google thinks people named Priscilla, want:

1. Priscilla wants Instagram followers. Someone whose screen name is Priscillachambers is busily building a following of thousands on Instagram. Person claims to be a "transwoman." Nufsed. As a guess this person has paid Google generously for this message.

2. Priscilla wants to decolonize parenting. This is a person who accepts the dubious label "Latinx," which does interest me. I've never heard anyone say "Latinx" in Spanish and would like to know what this hybrid word sounds like. What she imagines "decolonize parenting" to mean, in English or Spanish or any other language, I'm not sure I want to know. It could logically mean speaking their ancestral languages and teaching children their ancestral culture, but I'm guessing it means put children into Socialist creches at an earlier age to make sure they're brought up as Socialists. Somehow one's expectations for people who identify as "Latinx" are lower than for people who identify as Latino/a.

3. Priscilla wants Elvis Presley. They are, of course, thinking of his widow. All I ever wanted of Elvis Presley was the omnibus album of his gospel songs. I have it. I am content. His non-gospel songs I can live quite happily without.

Fifteen years ago when I was the first "Priscilla King" Google had ever heard of, the Internet was a small enough social world that Google might have heard about something like the porn video, or videos, in which I allegedly appeared. At least people have tried to send things to my cell phone that they said were porn videos in which they said they thought I appeared. The cell phone does not play videos, which is one of several things I like about it. Studying some of those Photoshoppy "where are they now?" sites in which all those dead celebrities are reportedly living in the same posh compound on the same beach, I have issued an official pronouncement on the Photoshopped porn videos: You should not even look unless they've paired me off with Elvis Presley, and I'm not going to look unless they've paired me off with President Kennedy. (Seeing as how my eyes had hardly opened when he was shot, I think any storyline that put him and me in the same place would have to be at least funny.) 

4. Priscilla wants a wedding dress. Well, last week, somewhere there undoubtedly was a Priscilla who felt that she needed a wedding, and it is pleasant to think that now that's settled and that poor woman only wants a wedding dress. I hope somebody makes it possible for her to afford a nice one.

5. From "Casablanca Bridal." I hope that place is of service to that Priscilla, whoever and wherever she may be.

6. Priscilla wants...Sofia Coppola. I had to click to find out what the connection was. Apparently Ms. Coppola wants to make a movie about the life of Elvis Presley's widow. Whatever.

7. Priscilla wants...San Antonio. My grandmother was from Panola County, Texas, but some of my other relatives live in and around San Antonio. It is a charming, historic city. I've visited them there. I wrote an historical romance about the history of the place, once. While writing I would have liked to have had time and money to revisit the place, and look up more things, and get more ideas for sub-plots. Unfortunately that wasn't in the budget. 

8. Priscilla wants...country singer. I had to look that one up to. Apparently somebody called Priscilla Block wants to be a country singer and, by some measures of success, she already is one. She does not have a following here, among people who favor the Carter Family, the classic Grand Ole Opry, the Old Ridgerunner Show, the Rabbit Show, and or The Possum. She has a chunky figure and a hairdo that looks as if it were achieved by pinning three or four different hairpieces together and plunking them down on her head. Her most popular songs include an affirmation of her preferring extra fries to exercise. She does not seem likely to replace Loretta Lynn or Reba McEntire, but "Thick Thighs" clearly speaks for a large portion of her generation. Heaven help them. She's been on what we now have in the way of a Grand Ole Opry and has about a dozen videos on You Tube. She has a nice voice. I hope we can get a glyphosate ban in time for this young woman to be able to enjoy exercise and vegetables; she may never fit into Dolly Parton's shoes but she sounds like someone who deserves a chance to become a grandmother.

"Thick Thighs" follows the commercial here.

9. Priscilla (Presley) wants you to stop calling Elvis a racist. Glad to oblige. People my age called him old, fat, and a has-been during his last years, but I never heard he was a racist, except in the Contemporary Clueless sense of "anyone who is not Black." And I wish the contemporary clueless would drop that. Sanctimonious political rhetoric has made many Americans proud to be Adorably Deplorable. At a "conservative" forum, a few weeks ago, someone snarkily saluted a loyal husband helping his wife fight cancer for his "toxic masculinity," meaning toxic to sanctimonious left-wing feminitwits. Reclaiming that sort of words from political abuse is, I can see, sort of funny. I don't think America is ready for people to try reclaiming "racist." The real thing is occasionally still found outside of a nursing home or other qualified institution, and still dangerous. 

And Google just goes on about these humans and all their human whims, but let us jump to the important result of our search: Priscilla the dog wants a good home. 

Priscilla from Puerto Rico 

Like many of the U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico, when she left the island (yesterday), she came to New York City. Priscilla Pup is thought to be one year old and mostly Labrador retriever, likely to grow bigger than she is now. She likes "kissing" humans. This is her first day on the mainland. Her web page is https://www.petfinder.com/dog/priscilla-58597224/nj/pittstown/lost-paws-animal-rescue-nj507/ .

Priscilla from Potomac 

When I opened Petfinder, the site took me directly to the page for pets called Priscilla in Georgia, but they said they didn't have one. How not? All popular given names for humans are given to shelter pets but it seems people in Atlanta don't usually leave pets in shelters for very long. This Priscilla was a problem pup so they sent her up to Maryland, to a ritzy suburb where it's hoped someone can afford to pay her vet bills. In addition to being spayed and vaccinated Priscilla Pit has had surgery on a leg. She is said to be a very clever, serious, responsible dog, the sort who wants to have a job. At the shelter she was left to choose her own way to show her work ethic. She chose to become a Shoe Manager. She likes to collect all the shoes and store them on and around her bed to make sure less responsible puppies don't try to eat them. Priscilla can't help it if her ancestors were dreaded Pit Bull Terriers. She has been brought up to be a cuddly pet, Her $350 "adoption fee" covers veterinary expenses, most of which are thought to be behind her. Her web page is https://www.petfinder.com/dog/priscilla-57745451/md/potomac/forever-changed-animal-rescue-md520/ .

Priscilla from Pontiac 

The photo settings are unusual because this Priscilla Pup is already a large dog--69 pounds and still growing. Her ancestors include police dogs and collies. She may tolerate a little gushing about looking like a wolf with a fluffy coat if she has a serious, responsible job with someone who is strong, fast, and tough enough to keep up with her. Her web page is https://www.petfinder.com/dog/priscilla-57605575/mi/pontiac/oakland-county-animal-shelter-and-pet-adoption-center-mi369/ .

Book Review: To the Far Blue Mountains

Title: To the Far Blue Mountains

Author: Louis L’Amour

Date: 1976

Publisher: Bantam

ISBN: 0-553-02757-3

Length: 287 pages

Quote: “It is a far land to which I’ll go. There be savages there, and forests such as you’ve never seen.”

So says Barnabas Sackett, planning his move to the wild frontier of Virginia. Sackett is the progenitor and prototype of other L’Amour heroes—always brave, usually right—though, unlike most of L’Amour’s novels, his story is a complete biography rather than a tragedy or comedy. A comedy usually ends with a wedding or some sort of small success; a tragedy usually ends with the tragic hero’s ruin, defeat, or untimely death; a fictional biography ends with a summary of what the protagonist left to his or her heirs, usually at the end of a long and admirable life.

So you have some idea how this book ends but, it being Louis L’Amour and any of his fictional Sackett clan, you know there’ll be plenty of adventures along the way. Enjoy.

My enjoyment was marred only slightly by the perennial problem of writing seventeenth-century English for twentieth-century readers. Most authors don’t even try, and most make it a little easier on themselves by telling the stories of seventeenth-century characters in the third person. L’Amour tries to pretend that what he has Barnabas Sackett saying is seventeenth-century English. It’s not, of course. L’Amour might have been able to write seventeenth-century English but, if he’d done it, his audience would have rejected his book. This book is written in twentieth-century English with an occasional seventeenth-century phrase thrown in. (I open the book at random: on page 101, in the first paragraph Sackett says “Show up here looking the way an officer on the poop deck should look, and you’ll keep the job,” and in the third paragraph he says “Aye, but I’ve no wish to displace you.” That low grinding noise I hear is cognitive dissonance. I’m not sure what John Smith or William Bradford would have said, in that context, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have been that.) Since the nineteenth century, where most L’Amour novels are set, the English language hasn’t changed much; people spoke differently than they speak now, but mostly in the sense that they had different things to talk about. Since the seventeenth century the basic grammar and vocabulary of English have changed significantly; we can still read Milton, Spenser, or Swift, but we’re constantly aware of how much our common language has changed, and have to wonder whether we’d be able to converse with them. We could converse with Barnabas Sackett—which raises the question whether any of his contemporaries in the real world could have conversed with him.

Louis L’Amour saw himself as a serious historian who read about many places and periods, then wrote the kind of adventure stories his audience bought. In this novel, he was celebrating the United States’ Bicentennial, a very successful marketing theme that some believe helped reunite a nation torn by economic trouble following an inexcusable war. It is possible that visions of TV mini-series, which were starting to call for strong heroines and multiethnic casts, danced in his head as he created Abigail the perfect bride, big tough Lila (recognizably based on some of America’s legendary lovable eccentrics), Thorvald the noble Norseman, Potaka the friendly native American (from a lost tribe), Sakim the Muslim scholar, Kane the loyal Irishman, and the rest of the many likable characters in this book. Yet the prospects for TV mini-series don’t affect the real history. At this period the better organized settlements of European immigrants in North America were tight-knit, gossipy little villages that could fairly call themselves things like “New London” or “New Amsterdam,” where most if not all the Europeans had come from the same place and lived in extended-family intimacy on the long journey across the sea. Most of the history was written in such places. Yet at the same time smaller groups of adventurers were forming, breaking up, and re-forming as people’s adventures had led them; nobody was ordering these people to send regular reports to anybody, and while carrying everything they owned through the forests few of them bothered to carry pens and paper; such groups were often multiethnic, and made up of heroically quirky individuals, not necessarily less heroic than Barnabas Sackett and his little band of friends. If your American genealogy goes back nine or ten generations, or more, your ancestors probably included a few characters like these.

Status Update: A Cheerful Little Whimper

Well I've been having a glyphosate reaction all weekend. I much prefer to explain  celiac disease to people as a condition that causes cooking, but in fact there are other symptoms. There is a state where the body is constantly trying either to get rid of some of the glyphosate inside it, or to lie down and rest after doing that for a few hours, until it's time to purge again, and so the body has to be severely disciplined to get it to do anything besides moving from bedroom to bathroom. 

That's where I spent the weekend. After coming back from the bathroom I would sit down in front of the computer and say to my body, "Now take the next magazine off that stack and check it for articles by or about X." I had promised a correspondent a collection of the articles by and about X in a certain magazine. The body, being hypersensitive to everything in its current Weepy Weed Mode, would respond with "I want to check it for traces of mold." I would say "There! Smells like glossy paper and glue, doesn't it? Now let's look for X's name on the pages," and the body would sit up and look at a half-dozen pages and then start to droop over to the side saying, "It's actually possible to sleep curled up on this bench, fairly comfortably, if we could only get that Unsatisfactory Toshiba out of the way. Either the head or the feet ought to be where the Unsatisfactory Toshiba is." I spent the weekend feeling dissatisfied with my own body, which spent the weekend feeling dissatisfied with the Unsatisfactory Toshiba.

A computer is the offspring of somebody's brain, and I am beginning to think that in the case of the Unsatisfactory Toshiba the person who programmed a piece of per brain into it was a certified idiot. The Unsatisfactory Toshiba spent an hour or two, this weekend, looking at a document that was open on its own screen and buzzing and trying to tell me that that document did not exist. It actually flashed the words "does not exist." I thought about telling it that it did not exist, but decided that thought might push the wretched little thing into such existential torment that it would never start again and none of my documents would exist. 

Also in the e-mail with the correspondent, the correspondent had carelessly asked for everything by Y, too, and I had carelessly replied, "Y not?" and then I opened one of those old magazines and remembered that Y, X's associate, had been a contributing editor. Every single issue contained at least one article by either X or Y; some contained both, and most contained some other contributing editor's comments, or else the company's advertisements, about what Y was up to.

I like reading both X's and Y's articles and am enjoying transcribing them, during the 20 to 25 percent of the time when I've been able to focus my mind, with the further complication that my astigmatism gets worse during glyphosate reactions, too. Twenty years ago when the editor of the magazine had that silly idea aboutusing a sans serif font in the magazine I wrote to say, "I can read it, but I'm sure many former subscribers can't." Now I'm one of the people who have to hold a magnifying glass over the pages of sans serif type. I hate sans serif type. 

Apart from that this is the sort of job I've always done so "prodigiously" well, and enjoyed; and I am enjoying it, so far as my temporary disabilities allow. 

This post is one big sprezz but I trust the astute reader to notice what a cheerful little whimper this sprezz has. 

</wail>

Oh, and also the Cat Sanctuary is due to rceuve some new kittens. One always wants to snuggle late-summer kittens on a frosty morning but, if living with a Queen Cat like Serena, one is better advised at least to try the "When will that woman come and take those kittens home? You're so kind to put up with them, Serena!" routine. 

I don't expect to be able to fool Serena for a New York minute but I think she does appreciate my making the effort.

Book Review: These Were Victors

Title: These Were Victors

Author: Leslie Hardinge

Date: 1983

Publisher: Pacific Press

ISBN: none

Length: 96 pages

Quote: "These persons were not among the most famous or best known in Scripture. Inspiration has recorded only enough information to show us their road to triumph."

Do you read Sunday School lesson books from churches you don't attend? Many people never do. I recommend this exercise, though, to anyone who'd like to learn more about a denomination. When churches are big enough to have these little books officially published, they often give them to members and visitors free of charge, and studying the lesson books can teach you a lot. 

I have a few "quarterlies" for sale in real life. They come from different denominations; many came in boxes of secondhand books, although These Were Victors was one I brought home from church--it's a Seventh-Day Adventist quarterly, and I attended that church faithfully from 1982 to 1987. I think the Seventh-Day Adventist quarterlies are among the "meatiest" daily Bible study guides. Seventh-Day Adventist "Sabbath Schools" really are schools of Bible study, the shuls where discussion and debate go on before people settle down in the sanctuary to hear the service. Each quarterly lesson book offers a full day's study, with triple spacing between paragraphs so readers can write out their answers to the questions discussed in the lesson (if they write small).Although the idea of a monthly or quarterly lesson book is for readers to meet and discuss what they've read on one specific day, the Bible doesn't change; a Bible study written for discussion in specific churches on April 21, 1983, is still just as informative now as it was then.

This one discusses thirteen Bible characters whose stories can be covered in one week each: Stephen, Lydia, Onesiphorus, Hannah, Onesimus, Ruth, Barnabas, Abigail, Eliezer, Dorcas, Caleb, Miriam, and Jonathan. "The victories gained by these persons were not seen as spectacular to men. Stephen was stoned as a martyr to his faith, while Jonathan's loyalty to his insane father cost him his life...Yet we believe that in the sight of [H]eaven each of these men and women were [sic] victors."

In the interpretation of these stories I detect some of the prejudice against introverts that I remember encountering among Seventh-Day Adventists in 1983. Hannah, we are told in 1 Samuel 1:7-10, was unhappy and was praying alone, apart from others, in the temple. (Temple services focussed on barbecues with plenty of wine, also featured shouting and dancing and singing and banging on cymbals, and probably had more in common with raves than with Seventh-Day Adventist church services.) Her silent, solitary prayer was a sign of passionate intensity. But Hardinge goes further to cast an unfavorable light on the fact that "she left to be by herself": "Hannah could stand the family pressures no longer...Perhaps in her anguish she felt that she might give way to anger or even revenge." And then again, perhaps she just had faith that if God could hear anything in the general commotion God could hear the prayer of someone who'd stepped aside from the clamorous mob...though poor old Eli was such an ineffectual religious leader that he thought someone not raving was more likely to be sick, or pass out, than to be praying, just as people in twentieth century churches that tried to normalize extroversion were likely to think a person bowed in prayer was dozing or suffering from a toothache.

Barnabas, on the other hand, we are told was "obviously a warm, outgoing, people-oriented person." The Bible does not positively affirm that Barnabas was an introvert, nor did he leave behind anything well enough written to prove that he was one. What we're told about Barnabas was that he was generous, that he was among the first to trust Paul, that he later championed his young cousin Mark against Paul, and that he wanted to avoid a direct confrontation about a point of doctrine. This could easily be the profile of an introvert. Introverts avoid confrontations about their beliefs because they don't feel ready to defend their beliefs in a perfect, winning yet conciliating way; extroverts, because they want to feel that people liiiike them more than they want to be right. (Likewise, Mark's terse writing style could be that of an introvert who thinks most people run on too long, or an extrovert who doesn't want to sit still and write down his thoughts.)

But these are the only ideological prejudices that leap out as I glance over this little book. On the whole it's a tiny treasure box of historical studies. "Barnabas" looks like a surname--bar meaning "son"--but how many commentaries bother to tell us what his given name was? How many mention that Lydia came from Turkey? (Yes, Turkey, and this web site devoutly hopes that our current multitude of Turkish readers are motivated by a spirit as good as Lydia's.) That the elaborate displays of friendship between David and Jonathan were political pageantry rather than same-sex courtship, and that, nevertheless, each of those men risked his life for the other--and for peace between their parties--more than once, is not such an unusual point for a Sunday School book to make. That Onesimus's apologies and pleas for forgiveness did not take the place of, but rather gained their credibility from, his willingness to make restitution used to be more often commented on than it is today.

Looking Back...

This Sunday morning post refers back to the devotional post from Galilee Life, the Christian (and "conservative") alternative to Etsy. (Yes, it's Mailchimp. I apologize. I've opened e-mails in browsers and seen them turn out to be from Mailchimp many times, and in several years only two of those e-mails presented problems. But you might want to back up your computer files before opening. Nice people use Mailchimp; unfortunately it seems to be easy for nasty people to hack into.)

https://mailchi.mp/4591132ec0bf/learning-to-experience-a-fruitful-and-joyful-life-in-jesus-15931605?e=abf0012626

"

Is looking back always bad? Short answer: no. In the Lord, it can be a beautiful reminder of just how far you've come.

" 

In the early 1980s I attended a church college. Regular readers already know that.

For those who don't know, church colleges tend to attract a majority of students who are not actually Christians. Their parents joined a church and have applied heavy pressure to keep them in. They were baptized or whatever at the age the denomination recommends. They went to Sunday School...

"What are your thoughts on today's Bible story?"

"Can we call out for pizza?"

They spent their teen years like that, pretty much. While most of them were being protected from teen drug addiction and teen parenthood, as their parents hoped, they were actually being immunized against developing real spirituality. For them, church is a place where other people want you to sit around wasting time, mainly to prevent you from doing things you would naturally want to do, on your own, such as drinking alcohol, taking drugs, and making babies.

Teenagers who have any real spirituality, however immature, and adults who are really on a spiritual path, also attend church colleges, often in order to become ministers or missionaries, sometimes just to study the Bible. They totally do not fit in with the majority of their fellow students. 

So there's a tendency for the more serious students to form small groups of their own. After a freshman year when I didn't like being "accepted" by one of the little prep-school cliques who spent gorgeous sunny afternoons indoors looking at their school yearbooks and wailing about the possibility that they looked fat, and was then sort of adopted by a brilliant young actress who'd had a conversion experience in drug rehab, I started sophomore year in such a clique. The actress and I and another serious little girl, who was the Dean's niece, found it easy to run in a pack of three girls and three boys without forming "couple" relationships. Other students could go their own way. No problem.

"We don't want cliques at this school! We don't want people to feel left out!"

By the end of the term I was feeling left out. The actress and one of the boys had been expelled (for drug offenses) and another of the boys had flunked out. The other girl and boy were nice, but not close friends. We didn't even claim a table in the cafeteria. Sometimes I sat at a table that other students avoided before 5:30 because, at 5:30, a lot of older nursing students claimed it; if I was still there when they came in, I didn't get up and leave, and they had nothing much to say to me but thye weren't snobs, and in fact they paid me to type their papers. (All of them were Black.) Sometimes I sat with the girl Mother had told me to ask for as a roommate. Well, Mother didn't know the girl's name, but she had said, "If you ask for a roommate who speaks French or Spanish, that'll help you learn more of the language." So we hadn't become roommates but we were friends, mainly through the Puerto Rican girl's efforts, and sometimes we sat at the table where conversation was in Spanish. Sometimes other people in the arts departments sat with me, since we were in the same classes, but they all seemed so much older and richer and more sophisticated, I wasn't sure about claiming them as friends. I did not have the kind of friend I could write songs with, and I didn't really care a great deal about other kinds. 

In the second term of sophomore year I moved off campus, because now I was old enough to sign a lease, and it saved so much of the taxpayers' money. Now I could just work and study and write. That suited me just fine. I made the Dean's List.

"What's the use of going to college in Washington if you're not developing the grace of hospitality?! You can't just hole up on your own and miss out on all the social life! You should watch Hyveth Williams," whose son is about my age but who was an undergraduate ministerial student and in some of my classes. "She has Friday night Bible study salons. That's the sort of thing you need to learn here, that you couldn't learn at public school if you only want to save money."

I watched the future Dr. Williams. I went to her Friday night gatherings, travelled with her when she was asked to preach practice sermons. She gracefully accepted the chore of being my, and several other students', first close Black friend. She was one of the few people who are remembered and missed at schools after they've graduated. I learned something, too, about the layers of friendship, from her. Any of us kids could vent our feelings to her about course work and social life, and she vented her feelings about those things to us. What she meant by saying she was "mothering" us, in Will I Ever Learn, was that none of us had a clue about the personal and professional harassment she was dealing with. She didn't burden us with that. You don't meet people like her every day.

Then she graduated, and now the people in those three different social groups who were my friends, on some level or other, were upperclassmen. I didn't feel older, richer, or more sophisticated, but I did have my own place, job, and money. Other junior-year students in that situation drew together. By the end of September we were a group and claimed a table. A long one. Sometimes two tables pulled together.

One afternoon in September, when I hadn't completely scheduled out the luxury of writing in a diary, I made a little list. I asked myself who were my favorite people, and why I'd heard the same judgments passed on them that I was always hearing passed on me. 

("Who was passing harsh judgment on whom? What did I say? Who said what?" is the sort of thing the People Who Were Never Going To Be Friends would say if anyone mentioned hearing harsh judgments passed on them by Seventh-Day Adventists. Why would anyone bother to remember? A healthy mind does not obsessively analyze unpleasant conversations. It was college. My mind was too full of pleasant and/or educational words to store the details of the verbal abuse. All I remember about the verbal abuse was that a great deal of it went on, and most of it was the sneaky deniable kind: "But I didn't say 'Why are you so antisocial?' in that judgmental way, I only wanted to know if you could tell me why it is that you are so antisocial, in a Christian way, so that people could try to help you" is a typical reaction. In the S.D.A. dialect of verbal abuse "antisocial" meant "having a life of your own and not being especially interested in me," it being presupposed that people who are really antisocial, in the sense of criminal, would never be found at S.D.A. churches or schools...though they are.)

Then I asked myself about whom, if anyone, the People Who Were Never Going To Be Friends found anything good to say. Well, the school did have what might have been called a popular clique of people who were often commended by school administration types, though they weren't really a clique in the sense of all hanging out together. But they did have something in common, I could now see, besides being older and richer than I was. By now they weren't necessarily older, and if they had access to more money most of them were earning less. They were the children of particularly influential members of the church. Churches that belong to large international denominations have little hierarchies of church officials, however part-time or low-paid those people's jobs may be, and those hierarchies generate a form of office politics. So, if your father or grandfather was a minister, or your aunt was a church secretary, you might actually be getting paid for holding office in "student government" and anything else you did was likely to be commended in assembly. If your father never actually attended a Seventh-Day Adventist church meeting in his life, as mine didn't, the school administration people might like you but you were not going to be groomed for membership in the older people's little clique.

I didn't blame the student government types but I did think they and their social lives were on the boring side. I mean to say. I knew a girl who was in that crowd, and liked her, and the column she wrote for the school paper was about shopping. Not bargain-hunting for groceries and library book sales, which would have interested me, but shopping for useless gift items. Obviously, in the crowd of people who were earning our own money to pay for things like rent, food, and school supplies, that idea was dead on arrival. 

I don't remember consciously thinking: "Hey, there are as many of us as there are of them, more of us are full-grown adults, and we're 'smarter.' We could become THE popular clique." I don't know that anyone consciously thought that. It just happened. 

What I was actually feeling, that year, was depression. If I described the way I felt to any psychologist active today, I'm sure I'd get a prescription for an antidepressant in fifteen minutes. It was physical fatigue from not sleeping enough, and social fatigue from not spending enough time alone, and early-stage celiac disease from eating the S.D.A.-approved wheat-gluten-based vegetarian diet. About the only emotional "erroneous zone" I needed to worry about was my willingness to believe that my feelings came from my thoughts instead of my physical health. The psychological thought of the early 1980s had me worrying about the fact that I was worrying.

Anyway I felt unhappy, more specifically very very tired, when I was alone and I wanted to believe that the cure for that was filling the time with more social activity. I was too young for heart disease but I "go, go, goaded" myself to the point of falling asleep on the job. It was so easy. All I had to do was find people who were more interested in talking about themselves than in attacking me, and listen to them, really listen, as if I'd never heard their stories before, which in fact I hadn't. I was nineteen.

"Oh those two? Well the really pretty one's not so bad actually, you know, she's Dr. --'s niece, but the short one's the real Queen Bee of that clique.,,well, you do know what she's got--C-cups!"

Say whaat? They meant me? Yes, they meant me. During the second term school administration types were always summoning me to have little talks about this new problem, that now that I had friends and a busy social calendar I was seen as a Queen Bee.

"There is no organization. There is no leader. There's a fellow who has a van, he's dating someone else now actually, and there's the ministerial student who buys the tracts we hand out when we do that, but it's not a club. It's just that once or twice a week I still eat in the cafeteria, and people I know sit together. Sometimes somebody has an idea for something to do. That's all. It's not as if we didn't invite freshmen. Sometimes we recruit freshmen." 

Distributing tracts in public places was something the church had mostly given up, partly because it made us look like Jehovah's Witnesses. One of the older ministerial students had the bright idea of reviving it and would buy cases of fifty tracts for people to distribute. It was mostly the fellows' thing, because most of the White girls in the crowd had been conditioned to feel afraid to be off campus after dark. Some of the Latinas--I should say young women, because they were older, some with full-time jobs and some married--weren't afraid, though, so after a few weeks I joined the crowd. I'd go with whichever of the boys asked first. The Latinas ventured, in pairs, into rougher neighborhoods where more Spanish was spoken. I went to the shopping plaza where students normally shopped in the daytime, where the majority of the population were older and White, but some of the younger families moving in spoke Spanish.

"Y cuanto cuesta?" 

"No le cuesta nada, senora. Es gratis como el don de salvacion que pagaba Cristo. Para el librito se lo ha pagado ese caballero." 

I was the one who added the half-dozen Spanish editions to the stack of twenty tracts in English we gave away. I was also the one who spoke first to the lady shoppers. My usual buddy on these missions was tall and dark, and in the process of fulfilling an ancient (in the college sense) prophecy that some day he'd grow into his feet and look like the young Ronald Reagan. He was a good fourth-generation church member, handing out tracts in good faith, but his physical presence intimidated some people who did not know this.

He was supposed to be my boy friend, in some sort of non-touching S.D.A way. He and I worked well as a team, and I loved him for that reason--if only other people had been able to stop fantasizing about what they thought they would have done if they'd had our physical attributes. We compared genealogies and determined that none of our ancestors had been in the same place at the same time for two hundred years. Several of them must have been close before that time, then, because we were the genetic equivalent of cousins. I showed people an old snapshot of my father and everyone thought it was an overexposed picture of this friend, and everyone agreed that I looked remarkably like his sister. So he and I were great friends until someone would suggest that we were a couple, and then whichever one of us had heard the insinuation would think "Him/Her? Well s/he is growing into the feet/C-cups, but kissing her/him would be like...EWWW! ICK!" and we'd stop speaking for a few weeks. It's funny in hindsight. At the time it was a source of tremendous teen angst.  

Anyway I was not completely passive in this tract ministry, but the Latinas were much bolder and more active than I was, in their soft-spoken way. Later someone wrote a book about how the Spanish culture favors a kind of modesty that kept Latina women from being recognized and promoted on jobs. When speaking Spanish you normally don't even say "I" at the beginning of a first-person sentence; the word for "I," yo, also means "self" and "ego," and in most situations using it can be avoided by using either a verb form that embeds the message that the person speaking is the person described as acting, or a more complicated verb form that embeds a message that something just happened and was nobody's fault. Some people who learned Spanish first have said they felt selfish, immodest, and rude just speaking English, because English grammar requires so much use of "I." Little things like that run through the culture in many ways, especially for women. One result can be that managers don't realize how much good work a Spanish-speaking woman is doing; another result can be that, if the managers notice this woman's good work, co-workers may feel that, while merely seeming to give them credit, she was sneaking ahead of them in some devious, treacherous way.

One of the things Adventists do that causes confusion between them and Mormons is that both groups have student missionary programs. Mormons traditionally anoint a few selected male students as "elders" and send them out proselytizing, by twos, on bicycles. Adventists offer summer jobs as door-to-door book peddlers to students who apply and train for the jobs in the spring term at each college. (Colporteur is French for "neck-carrier," although carrying books in a harness strapped across the back of the neck is no longer required.) The trainees are "The Colporteur Club" and attend meetings where they're taught about salesmanship. In summer they are paired off and assigned to territories where they stay at someone's house and drive around in a car, preferably the car one student owns; they park the car and separate, each one working one side of the street, approaching strangers' homes alone. They get a little pocket money during the summer and a substantial scholarship toward next year's tuition, based on how many books they sell.

Most of the freshmen my friends and I invited to join us did not become real members of the crowd. I think they may have been the ones complaining that we were "intellectual snobs." (We liked learning things and took it as read that other people did too.) One girl, however, was moving and thinking as fast as any of us, and became my friend. Let's call her Jane Doe. She had always wanted to be a colporteur. My parents and jobs had almost stifled that ambition for me, but her parents said she could be a colporteur if she could work with me. So I wanted to be a colporteur too. She had a car and would do the driving. We went to club meetings and practiced door-to-door sales with grown-up salesmen up to the end of the term, in April.

In May I called the program manager right on schedule. "Did we get Big Stone Gap?"

"Jane Doe and Mary Roe got Woodbridge, where they'll be staying with Jane's parents," the manager informed me. (Jane's motives for being a colporteur had included living away from the'rents.) "You got the D.C. area. You can stay where you're living, keep your job, and distribute books in the city. What you and those boys have been doing is too good to waste. Your boyfriend has actually brought a man to church already,,,:"

"He wouldn't work downtown either," I said. "Neither of us has a car and we're not stupid enough to haul hundreds of dollars around the city on bicycles." 

"So you can work the suburbs. More money there anyway, and more families likely to buy the Arthur Maxwell books for the children. And we think it's fantastic the way you reached out to our Hispanic community, getting those older girls involved..." 

"They got me involved!" I wailed. "I'll have to tell my parents about this."

So of course my parents said "You're coming home and staying with your rich, sick, 87-year-old great-uncle." So I did. I'd already been talked into transferring to university instead of just doing a normal senior year at college; in July I was officially accepted, and in September I went there.

I was seriously annoyed, though, by the program manager's attitude toward the Latinas. They weren't in the Colporteur Club; they had their jobs and families to stay with, in the summer, rather than going off to live in some new town. He might legitimately not have realized how much they'd been doing. Or then again he might have been one of those older White people...we didn't call them "racists" back then, because they weren't violent haters, just benevolent, patronizing idjits. People my age knew, though, about those older White people who blithely assumed that any Anglo-American was more competent than any other kind of person. Knew and were much offended.

I was not mature enough to follow through on that. In hindsight I think that what I should have said was, "Please, sir, I want Ester Lopez and Lilian Garcia," or whatever their real names were, "to take over. They'll only work together, but they're the bravest among us and the best salesmen. Is it too late for them to have the training and join the official program? They need tuition scholarships too. I wanted to get out of the city for the summer, and have another job that will let me do that." Then I should have talked to Ester and Lilian and urged them to petition, in their soft-spoken way, for the job that was being offered to me. They were full-grown women; both of them had cars. They would have been good at that job. But I didn't do any of that, because I was nineteen and saw only small glimpses of the world beyond the end of my nose.

Time passed. The book called Chiquita's Cocoon documented that that kind of thing was going on, may have raised some people's awareness of it. Mostly those older White people retired. I stopped attending church, because God's House is no place for the verbal abuse games I wanted to stop playing, and lost touch with Ester and Lilian. I worked with other Spanish-speaking people, some of whom had learned all too easily to speak loudly, say "I," and move to the front in a crowd.

Mother continued to attend Seventh-Day Adventist meetings and bring in their literature. In the 1990s I read in the Review & Herald that the Adventist denomination in North America seemed to be falling apart, but the denomination was being kept alive by rapid growth in South America. Other Christian groups were also reported to be growing rapidly in Spanish-speaking countries.

More recently, Etsy and E-Bay conspicuously snubbed sellers of Christian-theme products, then positively censored sellers of Republican-theme products. The company that stepped forward to replace these people's platform was called Galilee Life. The name is meant to suggest that it's a Christian-friendly business. People of any faith or none can join, but the newsletter they receive is Christian, with the option of receiving devotional messages in the e-mail. The newsletters are written in perfectly fluent US English. 

The names of the managers are Spanish.

North Americans of Spanish descent aren't stuck in any kind of cocoon, if they ever were. They are finding their own ways to step forward, without giving up traditions of modesty and politeness. They are, for one thing, rapidly becoming a majority in Protestant churches. It's no longer likely that anyone will assume that, if people called Smith and Sanchez work on a project, it was Smith's project or idea. 

As I observed in 2016, before Candidate Trump bought out the election between Candidates Cruz and Carson, progress has been made.

Mark Warner on Public Service Loan Forgiveness

From U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA):

"

Hey folks,

I wanted to reach out to provide an important and exciting update for joint consolidation student loan holders and a reminder for anyone eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness! Earlier this month, President Biden officially signed into law my bill allowing borrowers trapped in joint student loans with a former partner or spouse to sever their consolidated debt. 

Between 1993 and 2006, married couples could combine their individual student loan debt into a single joint Direct Consolidation Loan or joint Federal Consolidation Loan. But when this practice ended in 2006, there was no way for borrowers to sever the debt for any reason, including divorce, separation or abuse. 

But this process did not only impact separated couples. For years, borrowers who would individually qualify for student loan relief programs, such as the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program – which is available to those who have worked in public service, including teachers, state workers, and veterans – were ineligible due to the specific conditions of joint consolidation loans. 

My legislation provided a fix for this problem, allowing borrowers to not only sever their debt, but also take advantage of debt relief programs like PSLF. 

Now, it will take some time for the Department of Education (ED) to fully implement changes for borrowers to request separation of their joint consolidation loans, but with the limited PSLF waiver deadline approaching, the Education Department released a set of guidelines for those looking to apply for PSLF waivers.

By Oct. 31, 2022, public servants who currently hold consolidated loans will need to: 

1. Use the PSLF Help Tool to determine if your employer qualifies for this program. 
2. Print and sign a PSLF form, and then have your employer(s) sign it. 
3. Submit a Reconsideration Request by uploading a PDF of your PSLF form as an attachment to the reconsideration request submission with the description: “I am a borrower impacted by the Joint Consolidation Loan Separation Act."

Ultimately, I think public servants – especially those that have been trapped in consolidated loans – should have more time to apply, and that’s why I’m also publicly pushing to extend the waiver through next summer. For now, though, it is still looking like the expanded waiver will expire on Oct. 31, so I encourage all to look through this resource and learn more about your eligibility and options. You can get started on this process here.

If you ever want to share your thoughts about an issue that’s important to you, you can send me an email any time using the form on my Senate website. You can also follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

" [that signature graphic Google doesn't like: Mark Warner]

Virginia has had varying amounts of funding to allow varying amounts of help with student loans, for people who serve the Commonwealth, for a long time. Typically loan forgiveness/reduction for teachers has, for example, been offered to people who teach math at very rough urban high schools or very poor rural ones, but not usually for most teachers. This letter reflects some expansion of a traditional program; it is not, as readers outside Virginia may assume, a new unprecedented thing. President Biden may be encouraging over-expansion but, historically, Virginia has been able to afford a little investment in people who take the jobs other qualified people don't want.

The amount of time I have for online reading varies from day to day. Congressman Boucher's newsletter is in the e-mail; it will show up here on Sunday or Monday.