Syllabus #268

At a faculty meeting right before Fall Break (which is just rude, by the way) we were asked the ice-breaker question, "Describe your fall break plans in one word, on a continuum between quiet and adventurous?"  And since "fuckthismeetingwhyarewehere" would have violated the spirit of the exercise, I chose "risky."  Mostly because that sounds vague and mysterious, where I'm sure everyone figured me for the catch up on reading and pet my cats type of agenda.

There's a time and place for resting, reading, and cat-petting, but this time, we pulled up stakes and flew out to Salt Lake City, where we rented a 4WD vehicle (a Jeep Compass that inexplicably smelled of old fish) and drove down to Moab.  We spend 3 glorious days hiking 30+ miles in Arches National Park and the Island in the Sky and Needles sections of Canyonlands.  

We woke up at 5 every morning to be in the parks and on the trails before the hoi polloi showed up in their RVs to drive from overlook to overlook and take pictures out the windows with their iPads without ever leaving the vehicle.  That is an actual behavior we witnessed in Yosemite several years ago.  This time, we saw a preponderance of wealthy-looking senior citizens dressed in what I'm going to call the Patagonia Mullet.  Adventure on the bottom, business casual on top.  From the waist down, dressed like they were about to summit Kilimanjaro, but in brand-spanking new hiking boots bearing not a speck of dust.  Waist up, dressed like they were attending a board meeting followed by a reservation at a white tablecloth restaurant. 

The first day, Monday, we bypassed Arches' timed-entry ticketing system by sneaking into the park at 6:15 AM.  We were all the way at the top of the park, starting out on the Devil's Garden trail by sunrise.  We topped it off with a drive down a 4WD gravel road to hike Tower Arch, and then we had hiked over 11 miles by 1 PM.  We didn't have anything else to do, so we drove out to Dead Horse Point State Park to see the famous overlook there, but it was so hazy with wildfire smoke that we didn't get very good pictures.

The next day, we drove an hour and 45 minutes down to the Elephant Hill trailhead in the Needles section of Canyonlands to hike to Druid Arch.  This was by far the coolest hike we have ever done.  It was just over 10 miles, with 360 degrees of dramatic topography and a nice mix of fairly flat walking through a sandy wash, walking through a narrow rock crevasse, boulder scrambles, and a rather steep slickrock scramble that was fun going up but rather embarrassing and ungraceful to descend.  

The last day of hiking, we spent the day in the Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands, where we did 3 shorter hikes.  We started the day with the 5.6 mile Neck Spring trail, which gradually descended most of the way down to the bottom of the canyon and then back up to the rim in a brief, steep rock scramble.  I was glad this was a loop and not an out-and-back, because that would have been real trash to have to get back down the same way.  Then we did the 2 mile out-and-back to the Grand View Point Overlook, followed by the 3.6 mile out and back to Murphy Point.  

By Thursday, I was ready for a rest day but by no means ready to come home.  If you hear frantic clickety-clacking in the background, it's just me desperately searching for real estate on Zillow and trying to find a remote job.  We are already trying to figure out how soon we can go back, if not to the Moab area specifically, to other parts of Southern Utah we have yet to explore.

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Analog Reading:

Let it be known to all that I have completed 1150+ pages of It and I am forever scarred.  The book wasn't that scary, honestly, but there were some really disturbing parts that will never leave my brain as long as I live.  I just have to hope that after he wrote the pre-pubescent sewer sex scene, Steve pushed back from his desk and said, "Well that was some weird shit, and it didn't feel good to write that down."

To cleanse the palate a little, I then read the shortest book on my Kindle while we were flying from SLC to Nashville - Sloane Crosley's Grief is for People.  It was a surprisingly witty take on a very depressing topic.

Now, for a work book club, I'm almost finished First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston.  I have by now fully accepted that thrillers and suspense novels are something I enjoy, but I gotta say I don't love when a romance is also central to the plot.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that cheapens things, but it just feels like a distraction, or a compromise somehow.  At any rate, the central mystery of who the main character is working for and what she's actually supposed to be using her fake identity to accomplish is intriguing.  I don't hate it, I don't love it, but I am interested in finding out how the mystery unravels. 

Syllabus #267

 

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All of this is true.  But let's prioritize censoring books instead of doing anything about gun violence, because I've heard if your mind is pure, the bullets from an AR-15 can't penetrate your body in a school shooting.  

Why are all the characters in Salley Rooney's novels so thin?  I think a reductive answer would be, maybe she has body image or food issues, but I'm sure there's more to it than that.  

Leaving this here in case it's helpful.  The insurance and bureaucratic red tape following a catastrophe sound almost as bad as the experience of the disaster itself. 

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Analog Reading:

Still plugging away at It, the scariest pronoun in town.  I'm finally past the halfway mark, with about 500 pages to go.  It's such a freaking weird, dumb premise, and yet I have no problem suspending my disbelief.  There are some really cringey parts, as always, but the more Stephen King I read, the more I marvel at this tightly woven universe where characters and places continue to resurface.

Syllabus #266

Lola would like convince you that the Autumnal Equinox is the official start of Spooky Season

I love the fishes 'cause they're so delicious, but I think if I had to eat exclusively sardines for one to several days, I'd never go near the ocean again. 

Mom, I love you, but I'm also glad this kind of parental surveillance technology didn't exist when I was in college.  

As a matter of fact, I DO know what you mean, Vern.  

I relate to this so hard.  The Titty Industrial Complex is failing those of us can't cram our cans into an A or B cup.  My boobs aren't even objectively that big, and yet I find it nearly impossible to find bathing suits that fit both my ribcage and my jugs.  Even ones that purportedly come in actual bra sizes often skew too small in the cup.  If I want the band to fit, I'm courting Janet Jackson at the Superbowl level danger with nip-slippage.  If the cups fit, the band just floats around my body like a hula hoop.  And don't even get me started on cute sports bras.  I saw a chick at a yoga class wearing a ONE-STRAP "SPORTS" BRA and I nearly stroked out from sheer rage.  A sports bra that actually holds my girls in place while I'm bending over, let alone running, is practically a medical device.  

Analog Reading:

I'm reading It.  Gonna be a while with this one.  All 1,200+ pages of clowns soliciting children for beejays.  What the actual hell?  And yet!  Parts of this book are delightful!  They have to be, to make you give shit one about the characters before they do battle with the forces of evil.

Syllabus #265

Life is relentless.

 

I haven't read this article about a school librarian turned activist yet.  Just dropping it here as a reminder.

I beg to differ about hackberries.  They're the worst.  One almost took out my car, and we had to spend thousands to have it removed because it was a crumbling abomination of nature.

Analog Reading:

I finished reading Carrie and started reading It on Friday the 13th.  That seems fitting.  The ending of Carrie was a lot more drawn out than I remember from the movie version.  If I recall correctly, the movie ends when she goes home and has a knock-down, drag-out, telekinetic stabbing fight with momma, and the house burns down, the end.  In the book, Carrie goes home from the prom and kills her mother, but goes back out afterwards.  Then, the whole town just about blows up and burns down, and Carrie dies in the parking lot of a roadhouse.  

Now I'm reading It, and I would pay money to have been a fly on the wall the first time an agent or editor read this book, and they're like, ok, little boy chasing a paper boat into a storm drain...sees some scary yellow eyes in the sewer...and it's a...the fuck?  A clown?  I dunno, man, seems weird.

Syllabus #264

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Where are all the pennies?  Well, I can promise you 96% of them are going to show up at my next frigging book fair. 

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Finished reading Full Dark, No Stars.  The last story was so very unsettling.  I mean, they all were, but the last one really made you question how you ever truly know someone, and where the line is between madness and the supernatural.

Now I'm reading Carrie, which is so fascinating on the level of craft, since it's King's first published novel.  Just like with many of his books that have been adapted to film, the movie version (or what I recall of it) was faithful to the letter in terms of dialogue.  The Carrie in the book, however, is continuously described as pudgy and ugly, which really doesn't track with Sissy Spacek's movie portrayal.

I promise I'll eventually read a non-Stephen King book again, but I have It cued up on my Kindle, so it won't be in the immediate future!

Syllabus #263

 Short missive today.  It's Labor Day, and sometimes this feels like labor, alright?

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This article is old, but it continues to haunt me.  I think this bar should be cited for selling Malort, regardless of what hideous insects they're adding to it.

Young men leading the charge of weird, self-flagellating asceticism?  I dunno, raw-dogging sounds like a good way to restore your attention span.  Just be in a space.  Look around.  Think your thoughts!

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Analog Reading:

Finished Stephen King's The Institute.  It was like if the X-Men and Stranger Things had a very violent baby.  It had all the things Stephen King loves to slip into his books:  child sodomy, the n-word, gratuitous violence!  All of it!

Now I'm reading his novella collection, Full Dark, No Stars.  The first one, 1922, was, as promised, fully dark.

Syllabus #262

Childless cat lady, reporting for duty.  

We tried to take our cat visitor to animal control, but they were like, "So sorry, no vacancy, that's your cat now, lady!"  And I was like, "Is that because I touched it last?  Are we really doing this?"

So $300 and a flea comb later, Lucy is my new Drug, Disease, and Drama Free roommate.  No FeLV, no FIV, no parasites.  All her shots and a clean bill of health.  A flea or two.  We're working on it.  Does she have a uterus?  She's not telling!  I guess the vet tried all the non-surgical ways of discerning whether she's been spayed, and none of them were conclusive.  So she could be spayed, or she could be about to spray a littler of kittens all over my bathroom in a few weeks.  She's probably spayed.  But if she's not, we learned that cats can still get all the abortions they want in the state of Tennessee, so there's that.

We are slowly introducing the idea of her presence to the other cats, and so far they are surprisingly unbothered.  We served them dishes of Special Occasion Wet Food on a towel that Lucy has been sleeping on.  They ate with gusto.  We'll do that again tonight, and then tomorrow we'll graduate to setting up Charlie's big dog crate in the doorway to Lucy's room and feeding all of them at the same time where they can see each other through the crate but not get at each other.  If that goes well, the next night, we'll collapse the crate and stand it across the doorway, so they can see each other and be in closer proximity while eating.  If that doesn't result in a lot of hissing and yowling, then we might be ready to let them eat in the same space the next night?  

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Analog Reading:

Still plugging away at The Institute.  It's not my favorite Stephen King ever, but I'm not not enjoying it.  The main problem is that I have had mostly abbreviated segments of time in which to read lately, so I haven't gotten into a good flow with this book.