Last Saturday I had a delightful lie-in with the cat and posted this gem on the Twitters.

It's Caturdaaaay! pic.twitter.com/hVuFTjP5GZ

— Laura Lindeman (@lclindeman) February 28, 2015

Andy and I took a loooong walk to a new neighborhood “market” (more like a food hall) to have our February date which was to get ice cream. We decided to include lunch first, and we paid way too much for two shawarma wraps (I’ve decided this whole food hall is more expensive than it’s worth). And then, we were both feeling full, so we ended up skipping the ice cream! On the walk home I started feeling sick to my stomach and, well, the rest of the weekend ended up passing in a haze of lying ill in bed and on the couch. I even ran a feveer–I can’t remember the last time that happened.

So this weekend has been much better all around, though that’s not necessarily saying much. We made up for our ice cream date with some Ben & Jerry’s during the week. That Americone Dream is really yummy!

My links this week are awfully freelancer/working girl heavy. It makes sense. A lot of what is on my mind of late is trying to settle into a routine that is satisfying and productive.

Having a life does not mean you can’t be successful.

Anyone who has spent time in both the startup and more traditional working worlds can attest to the huge difference between the two. One provides a (usually) safe and calm environment where you can be pretty sure your job will be there tomorrow (although that’s not always the case), while the other can at times feel like a roller coaster with a loose wheel, tipping back and forth while you fly along at speeds hinging on the insane.

• I can attest to that. In fact, I’d venture to bet that it was that exact environment that triggered some of my anxiety last year. Sure, freelancing is akin to running a startup. But I’m in complete control (or at least I’m trying to be!), and this article was an important reminder for me.

Throughout our careers, we’ll design hundreds of projects, but few of us will opt to take on the most rewarding and complicated creative project of all: our own lives.

• Related: stop apologizing for wanting work/life balance.

It might be hard to understand for an office-dweller, but many of us home-based workers find pausing to take care of laundry or unload the dishwasher to be a welcome change of pace. Blogger and editor Heather Spohr believes the freedom to pause and take care of “home stuff” is one of the best parts about freelancing.

• I would agree! I find it eminently satisfying that I can handle personal tasks and errands during the “workday” sans guilt. Sometimes that boost of productivity in another arena can help me focus better on a work-related task at hand. Read the other “rules” that freelancers break.

Given a man and a woman with equivalent skills and experience, the base level of competence that people assume is lower for the woman than for the man. Men and women both do this, and it is largely unintentional. It applies whenever we’re evaluating people or their work, such as when we’re meeting them at an event, interviewing them for a job, reviewing their code, or considering their talk proposal.

• On gender parity in the open source world. Though I decided being a developer wasn’t for me, I still adamantly support women entering the software world. I’m volunteering right now as an organizer for a Rails Bridge workshop in Atlanta to teach women Ruby on Rails. It’s valuable for me to be a supporter and to provide boots on the ground even if I don’t want to be a developer myself.

For everything that exists, someone has to be passionate about it. Otherwise that thing would cease to exist. If nobody cared about copiers, they would disappear from office spaces. If nobody cared about commercial matting, someone would have to become passionate about those yellow wet floor signs because there would be a lot more gross floors out there. Our lives are impacted daily because there are people who are passionate about medical science, farming, and education. What if nobody cared about deodorant? What if nobody cared about music? What if nobody cared about mattresses and bed sheets?

• We all have different passions and we need all of them to keep the world as we know it turning!

Okay, okay, can we stop talking about work? Sure!

Whatever a flat white is supposed to be, here’s one thing it most certainly is, at least at Starbucks: It’s a new product that borrows a name with some cultural weight, regardless of how closely it sticks to that culture’s definition.

• I mean, let’s be real, I’ve started ordering it. I had a flat white first in Ireland and assumed it was an Irish thing. (It’s not.) I like it–but I’m not sure what makes it appreciably different from a latter. Check out this article for its entertaining diagram on specialty coffee drinks.

It is impossible to imagine eating most Southern foods without sweet tea. You can’t wash down pulled pork with water. It takes a beverage with some oomph to cut through lard-dunked catfish. The sugar in sweet tea is nature’s intestinal Drano. The caffeine makes it possible to drive home after a Sunday brunch of fried chicken and cheese grits. This is not to say sweet tea goes with everything—pizza requires Coke, curry requires beer—only that it marries best with the food of our people, cementing its status as the iconic Southern libation.

• Sweet tea is culture in a glass…or if you’re a Brit, it’s an abomination. Take your pick.

Did you celebrate National Grammar Day?

Happy National Grammar Day! I think I’ve been using “i.e.” when I’ve meant “e.g.” and to the grammar gods, I apologize.

— Laura Lindeman (@lclindeman) March 4, 2015

I realized I’d been misusing “i.e.” and “e.g.” I also ordered a t-shirt that says “To Infinitives and Beyond.”

Now that I’ve bestowed upon you that mental image, I think my work here is done.

You may not know this about me, but at the advanced age of 4 I was a radio superstar. Oh yes. With nothing more than a cassette tape recorder, an encouraging mother, and an active imagination, I took the airwaves by storm. My most somber show was known as “All Days Considered” (yeah, my parents listened to NPR), while my alter ego DJ “Vicksburg Sally” ran a gig with a little more oomph to it. Sally wrote and performed songs of her own making with a gusto rarely seen since then, including the hits “Learning How to Skate” and “Australia.”

photo credit: free photos

I’ve always loved to sing. I like to joke that in a previous life I was June Carter Cash, as played by Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line. Some days I think I missed my calling to be a cowgirl country singer like Jennifer Nettles or Martina McBride.

As a kid I rode around town in my dad’s little pickup trick listening to tapes of Nanci Griffith and Lucinda Williams. I knew all the words, including ones that were probably inappropriate for a five-year-old. Little did my parents know that they had a wordsmith on their hands, and their were momentarily appalled until they realized I was clueless as to the meaning. Nanci’s rendition of Townes Van Zandt’s “Tecumseh Valley,” where Caroline “turned to whorin’ out on the streets?” I had no idea what it meant, but I sang it with gusto.

I’ve only occasionally gotten to scratch my musical itch publicly or formally. In third grade I auditioned for the theatre department of an arts and advanced academics program with a tentative rendition of “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music. I’m not sure how or why I picked that particular song, but it got me in. For the next eight years I enjoyed the musical theatre classes that were interspersed with our straight drama, and I also had a chance to attend theatre camp in California where we put on a musical in two short weeks. Most of the plays I did you’ve never heard of, including that one. But we had revues periodically, and I picked some other odd songs to belt out. “Send In the Clowns” was a strange choice for a middle schooler, for sure.

I always said that when I grew up I was going to be in the church choir. It’s not likely that will happen at this point, and I’m probably a little too late and a little too reserved to be the next Reba McEntire. But what I’m realizing is that singing makes me happy. So I’m doing it more. More tunes in the shower, more goofy songs to the cat. I’ve created a Spotify playlist of “Country to Sing To” (it’s the June Carter Cash in me, those just happen to my favorites), and when I’m alone at home I turn it up and flex my vocal chord muscles.

It was hard to choose, but here are five of the best for singing along:

1. “Settlin’” by Sugarland (really anything by Sugarland!)

   I get home 7:30 the house is dirty, but it can wait
   Yeah, ‘cause right now I need some downtime
   To drink some red wine and celebrate
   Armageddon could be knocking at my door
   But I ain’t gonna answer that’s for sure
   There’s gotta be something!

2. “Wide Open Spaces” by Dixie Chicks

   Who doesn’t know what I’m talking about
   Who’s never left home, who’s never struck out
   To find a dream and a life of their own
   A place in the clouds, a foundation of stone

3. “Even If It Breaks Your Heart” by The Eli Young Band

   Some dreams stay with you forever,
   Drag you around but bring you back to where you were
   Some dreams keep on gettin’ better,
   Gotta keep believin’ if you wanna know for sure

4. “Mississippi Girl” by Faith Hill

   ‘Cause a Mississippi girl don’t change her ways
   Just cause everybody knows her name
   Ain’t big-headed from a little bit of fame

5. “The House That Built Me” by Miranda Lambert

   I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
   this brokenness inside me might start healing.
   Out here its like I’m someone else,
   I thought that maybe I could find myself.

What’s your favorite song to sing along with? Do you have any childhood activities that still make you happy?

What do you make of it when you open up a new book and find yourself confronted with a lengthy list of characters? Sometimes these are lists; other times they’re family trees or tables with relationships indicated in some way. I’ve also seen formats that try to indicate locations as well.

screenshot from My Brilliant Friend

screenshot from Wolf Hall

screenshot from The Luminaries

Call it what you like–an index of characters, a cast of characters, a character chart. What I call it is intimidating. It makes me think, “Oh jeez, this is going to be a complicated book. I’m probably going to be confused, or else why would the author have included this list of the characters?”

I take several issues with such a hefty list right at the start of the book. For one thing, the names and relationships are mostly lost on me, since I’ve yet to even dive into the story. For another, when I open a book, it’s usually because I’m ready to read! So I’m far from in the mood to peruse and try to commit to memory a long list of names I don’t know.

I can understand the impulse to include such a list. Usually these are in books that have a tangled web of inter-related characters, or, in the case of Wolf Hall, a lot of characters with similar names. I’m not sure what the best answer is. All I do know is that if I see a list at the beginning of my book, I’m almost sure to skip right over it.

I rarely have a desire to consult the list later, either. Especially on the Kindle, it’s a pain to “flip” back to the beginning and then find your place again, and that’s the format I usually read in these days. I feel like, if a book is engrossing and well-written enough, the character’s relationships should be written on my psyche. I shouldn’t need a reference list. And we’ve established that I, at least, certainly don’t want one.

Maybe I’m an anomaly. Maybe everyone else devours character lists and it enhances their reading comprehension. But somehow I doubt it.

P.S. I’m not biased against big books…in fact, we’ve established that I love them!

If we’re going by numbers, February was a bit of a bust in that I only read three books (one of which was a re-read). But one of the non-re-read books was a whopper at 592 pages, and it was non-fiction, to boot, which I tend to read slower.

I flew through this second novel in the Veronica Mars series, Mr. Kiss and Tell by Rob Thomas (NOT the guy from Matchbox 20!). I loved the show and have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the books. I guess it helps that the writer of the show is also writing the books. This book picks up right where the movie left off and gives us a LOT of Veronica and Logan, which is wonderful. The books so far have been a little grittier than the show, but very readable and fun.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee satisfied task #10 on my Read Harder challenge (a microhistory). Can we talk about the irony of that category name? Microhistory. I don’t think a single one of the books I considered for this task were micro by any definition. Rather, what it means is that it’s a history of a fairly small topic.

Emperor is a history of cancer. It went WAY back, to the first time in Egypt when something was diagnosed as a tumor. It talked about linguistics and medicine and public perception. It talked about advertising and research and human emotion. It was extremely well-written and made even some of the more technical bits fun to read. I can’t even fathom what it must have been like to tackle such a mega topic–all the research, not to mention the writing and editing that went into it.

I liked how Mukherjee interwove the history with anecdotes of his current patients. I got bogged down for about 150 pages somewhere in the 300s, but in general it was an enjoyable read that I would recommend if the topic interests you. I read this one in hardback, and, after mostly reading on my Kindle recently, it was sort of an adjustment holding up that beast! Plus paper books aren’t lit, so I can’t read as easily in bed. A true first world problem.

The final book I read in February was The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. After several heavy books of late, my book club wanted to read something fun and light, so we settled on a children’s book. I had read this before and in fact own a paperback that I evidently bought or was gifted back when paperback novels cost $3.99.

I tried to read this book once as a kid and couldn’t get into it. Then I read it a few years later and LOVED it. This time around, it was only okay. Interestingly, most of us in the book club who had read it before had a similar shift. I’m not sure why exactly that was!

It’s still a very clever book, and I like the way Juster plays with language and takes phrases at their literal meaning. It’s a fun read, but I was not blown away this time.

Sadly, I forgot to take a picture at book club this month, so you’ll have to imagine our smiling faces around the table at Rebecca’s house holding up our blue-covered novels. Maybe we can re-create it next month for posterity.

The day of book club this month, several people emailed to say they had something come up with work or weren’t feeling well and wouldn’t be able to make it. Amazingly, my crew of bookish ladies has grown large enough that even with some unable to attend we still have a solid group! That’s a pretty exciting milestone to me.

I started Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry in February, but I’m still working on it, so it’ll count as a March book. Keep an eye out for that one!

What did you read in February? What’s next on your TBR list?

Disclosure: links are Amazon Affiliate links, which help support my blogging habit

On Sunday night, with Andy out of town, I indulged in a $6.99 rental of Show ‘Em What You’re Made Of, a documentary about the Backstreet Boys.

For a woman of a certain age (read: mine), I would highly recommend this nostalgic romp through our adolescence. It took me some time to get into the flow and conceit of the documentary, but by the end I was dancing around to the credits (a compendium of 20th anniversary tour performances of their classic hits) and thoroughly freaking out my cat.

BSB’s 2013 album In a World Like This is a regular on my Spotify rotation, but I didn’t realize the story behind it, which is where this documentary starts. As a nod to their 20th anniversary, the Boys got together at a house in London and spent three weeks writing and recording songs. The first revelation of the movie for me was that they all play instruments (plural). Who knew! One of them said in the movie that they’re “a vocal harmony group,” and though I had never thought about them as more than a boy band, I realized that he was right. I LOVE harmony, and that would explain why I’ve always liked their music so much. In their early days, they toured around to high school gyms, sometimes singing a capella, and the clips included in the movie really highlighted what talented singers they are.

The beginning of the movie lacks some context. It dives right in and is not chronological. There are weird camera angles, as if it wants to be an art film rather than a documentary about a boy band. But hang in there. Things start making more sense before too long.

My second revelation was that 9-12 year old Laura really knew very little about this band that she liked. They were young when they got started–Nick was only 11. There was also a weirdly wide gap in ages between him and some of the others! So they’re now around 40 (and I have to say, Nick has aged quite well). Though I’d hardly have classified them as rock ‘n roll, they were not immune to the lifestyles struggles made famous on VH1’s Behind the Music. Girls, drugs, alcohol, epic road trips that spanned years at a time. Present-day Brian Littrell (who, by the way, is now a contemporary Christian artist that I had unwittingly sung along with on 104.7 The Fish and lives in Atlanta with his equally evangelically inclined wife) has some trouble with his vocal chords, which led to some nasty fights erupting in the London house. We got to see it all, and hear Nick Carter say the F-word. Don’t tell 12-year-old Laura.

Ultimately these are 5 guys who grew up together and have tons of fun with each other. That’s what really came through in the movie. I didn’t care so much about watching them in the studio, but the history was really fun for me (though WHAT were the late 90s clothes?!). They drove around on camera and visited all of their hometowns, including some old family houses and elementary schools. Each of them seemed to have a figure who really “recognized” them as kids and encouraged them to pursue music. At the time they were popular, I’m sure a lot of people would have disparaged calling what they made “music,” but the documentary really explores how talented they all are. It was surprising to me, given the personal bent it took, that we never “met” their wives in the movie, but maybe they’re not famous enough anymore that the Boys want their families to be household names.

The whole situation with Lou Perlman, their manager/organizer, royally screwing them over was something I had been aware of, but in a childish way. As an adult, watching other adults talk about how he had messed them up as teenagers, was much more poignant. Evidently he’s still in jail for what he did.

I was 9 when the Backstreet Boys had their first big hit, and I’m pretty sure I bought it as a cassette tape single. I still know all the words to the majority of their radio releases, and then some. They were a large part of the soundtrack of my adolescent years. At some point in the movie, I thought, “Oh, maybe I’m just not enough of a fan girl to really enjoy this.” But by the end, my inner tween was squealing, and I was pretty psyched to read that they are recording a 9th album. I’ve no shame in admitting that I’ll probably buy it, or at least stream it on Spotify.

I don’t know if the Backstreet Boys mania reached Beatles levels, but that’s all I can think to compare it to. There are other groups that received similar acclaim and to whom I’d have a similarly nostalgic response, but they don’t have documentaries about them available on iTunes. If you’re a child of the late 80s, or maybe even the parent of one (meaning you were subjected to fandom by extension), Show ‘Em What You’re Made Of is worth the price of admission.