The fireworks were really puny this year. I remember during COVID people really went all out. A lot of pent up everything was exploding.
Remembering COVID made me kind of sad. So did hearing the explosions. Plus, today I finished the novel Excellent Women about the lives of 1950s British spinsters, and the book is depressing. It’s well-written and even humorous at times but I found the lives of those poor women who call themselves “rejected” very sad. I know a couple of women like that, and it’s heartbreaking how they try to fill their lives and grab on to tiny, insignificant events to pretend like something is happening.
These days such women tend to be cognitively challenged. And men. I also know a man like that. They lead very orderly, routine-driven existences. In Barbara Pym’s novel, the rejected women fill their lives with church affairs. Today people don’t have that, so it’s harder.
It’s a good novel, if somewhat too deliberate and a bit forced at times. It’s just so hopeless, and I guess it wasn’t a good moment for me to read it.
Clarissa's Blog 
\ how they try to fill their lives and grab on to tiny, insignificant events to pretend like something is happening
Does the problem lie in having neither career nor children, while defining one’s self as “rejected” by unspecified men?
May people “lead very orderly, routine-driven existences:” work, working at home, work, sleep, etc.
Reminded me of Dolly Parton’s “9 To 5” song.
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The routine itself is great, it’s healthy. The problem is when the routine is the entire meaning of one’s life.
Mildred, the main character of the novel, can’t even read a book that’s a cut above a reflection of her own deeply meaningless life. Everything in her has atrophied, including her brain. She’s not a bad person but she buried herself in life for absolutely no noticeable reason.
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I believe nice fireworks were extremely cheap in 2020 and 2021 because so many cities cancelled their official fireworks displays and lots of theme parks and other places that do fireworks regularly were closed. People were literally getting more bang for their bucks.
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I’ve never encountered a more apt use of the “more bang for their bucks” expression. 🙂
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“the lives of 1950s British spinsters”
How old are they? Are the members of Generation Old Maid who were mostly deprived of marriage opportunities because so many of the men they might have married were killed in WWI?
They ended up changing British society very profoundly by entering the work force en masse… Sad to think of them living empty lives later on…
Or is it about something else?
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