I can’t believe it but I finished Embracing Defeat, six months after starting it. It wasn’t bland, but it was dense and not exactly bedtime reading. I’ve hauled it around from place to place and read a few pages when I could. Some segments are forgotten completely because too much time lapsed between readings. But I’m glad to be done and to have learned more about postwar Japan and American colonialism/imperialism. I’m left with an increased distaste for and distrust of American foreign policy. Our government is fickle and the desultory nature of its foreign policymaking has real implications on weaker states and this country's future. I feel less judgmental toward Japanese popular culture now. The miraculous industrial growth and vigorous consumption of American culture make sense. It was at once a prewar condition and by the victor’s postwar design (and conforms to Skocpol’s state theory of social revolutions—her theory is applicable to every history, it seems).

I love reading history. I always feel satisfied that what I’ve learned informs my understanding of personal contexts—mine and that of those I encounter. It facilitates empathic development.

I’m also about to finish The Battered Woman. This has been a faster read, but not all that compelling. It’s actually kind of boring because I already know the stuff. What was groundbreaking in 1979 is now the basics—it’s amazing that findings from her original research have withstood two decades of additional research to become and remain the conceptual pillars of the field.

I’m impressed by how well domestic violence issues have been introduced to the public and to the health care and law enforcement systems since the book’s publication. Twenty years later, DV is a primary concern for human services organizations—it’s got a checkbox on every intake form, whether police, legal, or health. It’s funny then to notice that society’s acceptance of the problem is contradicted by its simultaneous disbelief that the violence is real.

I’m glad to finish these two books so I can start two more. I’ve got a pile of borrowed books to work through, none of them easy reads. I hate that the borrowed things occupy a tiny but permanent place of anxiety in my head, so my goal this year is to read them and send them home. I have three to go.

He came at dawn and I woke a few hours later to make a protein shake and check e-mail before starting work. But the bed was irresistible. A breeze came overnight and it puffed through the wide open windows an empyreal yellow that made the room and bed feel like we really were at the top of the sky. So I lie there next to the dreaming one, listening to papers ruffle and the blinds tap against the sills. The surface of the blanket was refreshing like an ice cube yesterday and I wrapped my whole body around it to squeeze out the cold, to help our heat escape. Throughout the morning and early afternoon I stayed like that, shirking work for the appreciation of this unexpected idyll. I read until he stopped sleeping through my advances and then at three we went out to eat. (Are you hungry?...) In the evening, the light thickened, we went for a ride out to Alki, where we sat at the shore gazing toward the purpling mountains and talking about nothing in particular. Afterward, we ate again and returned to bed.