Betrayals Major and Minor

In times like these, do I turn to punk music or the old spirituals?  Should I listen to Rage Against the Machine on the way to work?   Or should I listen to Rhiannon Giddens sing "Freedom Highway"?

I am distressed at so much this morning.  Another morning, another invasion underway.  The U.S. has been betraying the Kurds for most of my adult lifetime, but each time, it makes me feel ill. 

Closer to home, the old white guys bluster and huff and puff and maybe all of our houses will come tumbling down.

I tell myself that I'm a grown woman with a mortgage and people counting on me so I must be sensible.  I tell myself that I'm a grown woman with a great credit score and no unsecured debt.  I tell myself that I'm a grown woman with a real doctoral degree in a real discipline from a state school that's been in existence for over two hundred years.

I spent the first half hour of the day reading essays about T. S. Eliot in these Me Too days.  It was an interesting modernist lit website I'd stumbled onto. But it also made me realize how much I used to know about this literature and the literary criticism about this time period--and how much I haven't kept up.

This is the day that the Nobel Prize in Literature should be announced.  I hope it will be Margaret Atwood, but the Nobel committee doesn't usually choose writers who have had popular success.

I am back after my shower--nope, the Nobel will not go to Margaret Atwood.  Once again, I do not know these writers.  But at least I know Margaret Atwood.

I find myself being judged by people who do not know Margaret Atwood.  Of course, those people would probably be aghast by my lack of knowledge of their cultural/artistic touchstones.

I should finish getting ready for work.  I think it will be Rhiannon Giddens on the way to work.  "You can take my body, you can take my bones, you can take my blood, but not my soul."