Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 24,698 as of 6:30am on Tuesday, 16 April 2019

EMD word count at 75,321—revised again through page 129.

I have already discovered a place where I’d pasted in a scene a second time—I was so sure I’d done that. I wrote new lines. I revealed no more than I must about the tragedy. It should, theoretically go in the center chapter 8, but something else happens then. A life transition works. 

The news reported the fire at the cathedral of Notre-Dame. I approached the story three times, each time shying away. I feel an investment in her engineered and necessary flying buttresses and elegant, irrational details. It’s okay with the reporter that the gorgeous spire has burned since it is “not original” but added later, but most everything was added later as they found benefactors to pay for her rose window and side windows, the detailing of wood and glass that the builders planned for but could only complete after the money came in. [Thank you, Darlene Sherrick.] 

The cable was out and the good news was that it was not our cable but everyone’s. 

Our education system works overtime to reinforce gender separation. According to The Atlantic:

“Friendship is a critical influence on what boys are learning about cultural norms and permission to be yourself. Because of the way children are separated by gender beginning in elementary school, boys’ first friendships are often with other boys. They learn to practice skills of sharing and intimacy and connection with other boys well before they do it with girls. And we know from research that boys’ friendships can be rich and deep and life-sustaining. Boys will say, ‘Without my friends I think I’d die.’ ” 

When my younger son started school, his best friend was a girl just up the road. That relationship was forced underground before they were seven. By high school they hadn’t spoken in years. By the time the girl was in high school, that girl had been deeply involved with two popular and famously brutal boys. Her parents didn’t want to hear my concerns and neither did she. She never forgave me for trying. 

And from Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent article about America’s troubling history with ridiculous conspiracy theories: 

“Donald Trump got his start in national politics as a ‘birther,’ promoting the idea that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Several news organizations have tried to keep track of the conspiracy theories Trump has floated since then. One list, posted by the Web site Business Insider, has nineteen entries. These include the claims that vaccines can cause autism and that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered.

“ ‘They’re saying they found the pillow on his face,’ Trump said of Scalia, during the 2016 campaign, ‘which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.’ (The Business Insider list is limited to full-blown conspiracy theories, and excludes the President’s more casual lies and fabrications.) ‘No president—indeed, no national official—has resorted to accusations of conspiracy so instinctively, so frequently, and with such brio as Donald Trump,’ Muirhead and Rosenblum write.” 

It’s still my country. Right or wrong? Right. I would wish it were right more often.