Syllabus #248

We really had ourselves a time this weekend.  We made big plans to be real humans who do things in the world, and boy did we execute.  We went to the zoo!  

If you want to be literal about it, we drove to the zoo.  Twice!  The misleading magic of Apple Maps took us to a back exit that let out into an obscure office park, so we pivoted technologies.  Google Maps led us faithfully to the actual entrance, from whence we made a slow, scenic crawl towards a parking lot.  

Along the way, a helpful sign hinted that we would need to present our pre-ordered, timed-entry tickets when entering the zoo.  A more helpful sign would have been placed out on the road, before an uninformed, spontaneous zoo-visitor is locked into a one-way traffic pattern from which there is no escape.  Sounds like the real endangered species here is spontaneity itself.  

In a way, I feel like the 20 minutes we spent trying to extricate ourselves from the zoo parking lot were more impactful than spending $60 to look at caged animals.  It was much more immersive.  We were the caged animals.

The small cat exhibit is always open

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Full disclosure, I haven't read any of these articles yet, but they have piqued my interest:

Why is OJ's Bronco in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee?  I have been to that museum!  I also saw Ted Bundy's Beetle.

The people behind all those NYTimes games.  I have a bone to pick with whoever is responsible for some of the more ludicrous categories from Connections.  The mental gymnastics required to come up with the commonality between some of these words is absurd.  Like going from point A to point F and assuming your audience will have the same train of thought to connect points B-E in between.  That's not connections, that's telepathy.  And don't even get me started on the day the entire puzzle was emojis.

I need to rewatch the Seinfeld series finale and then go back and rewatch the Curb finale.  Andy insists that the entire Curb series was just a spite series, 25 years in the making, to exact revenge for the Seinfeld finale.

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 Analog Reading:

Holly was over too soon.  Part of me is holding out hope that maybe she'll show up in another Stephen King book someday.

Finally got started on The Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange.  I am enjoying it so far, but it's a conscious effort to slow down and relax into the slower pace of this story, and to appreciate the prose.  It's a big shift after reading a Stephen King book that keeps you turning pages and almost skimming over parts because it's the action more than the prose that is important.

Syllabus #247

Are the kids ok?

Monday was April Fool's Day.  My butthole clenched when I realized the ominous date fell on a weekday.  I was sure I'd be having kids tell me it's snowing and try to sneak whoopee cushions onto my chair all. day. long.  AFD is right up there with Halloween, Easter, and Valentine's Day as days you do not want to be caught dead in a school zone.  It's the only non-candy-centric holiday to crack the top of the list.

You know what happened?  

Absolutely nothing.

No snakes in a can.  No handshake buzzers.  No whoopee cushions.  No shocking tall tales or attempts to trick and humiliate.  No prank phone calls.  No saran wrap over the toilet seat.  No vaseline on the door handle.  No bucket of water balanced precariously on the top of a door left slightly ajar.  No Ex-lax in the teacher's coffee.  

The youth have lost their edge.

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Was there a teenage girl alive in 1999 who didn't want to be exactly like Kat Stratford from 10 Things I Hate About You?  Abrasive icon.

I can't think of any earthly reason why I would go to Kansas City, MO, except to go to this immersive children's book museum.  However, I lowkey might be too scared to enter the Goodnight Moon exhibit.  And god forbid if there was a Polar Express exhibit.  I've still never made it all the way through that book.  Stephen King might be demented, but Chris Van Allsburg is a freak.

Larry David is having a moment.  It's only a matter of time before we're walking around with WWLDD? bracelets.  

Analog Reading:

Finished Ann Patchett's State of Wonder.  It started out a little slow for me, but once I was hooked, I was ensnared with the compressive force of an anaconda.  This was quite different from any of her other books I've read.  It gives echoes of Heart of Darkness and is a lot more tense and adventurous than her usual fare.  The overall gist is that a woman who works at a pharmaceutical company is dispatched to the Brazilian jungle to track down an elusive researcher who is supposedly developing a fertility drug on her company's dime.  The book was published in 2011, and it reads so differently today than it may have before Roe v. Wade was struck down.  The story hinted at a lot of interesting implications about women's reproductive choices, and the ending left a possibly horrifying outcome unexplored.  I can't help but wonder (or wish) if there was more to the story that Patchett wanted to explore, and chose not to for narrative expediency or other editorial reasons.  

Now reading Stephen King's Holly.  When I opened this book on my Kindle, I thought to myself, ahh, surely there are a good 600+ pages here for me to say goodbye to one of my favorite characters in recent memory.  Imagine my dismay and despair when I saw that this book clocks in at a mere 463 pages.  What gives??

Syllabus #246

I know Louis Gossett Jr. had a remarkable, century-spanning career, but I will always and forever remember him for this bizarre fever-dream of an anti-drug video that we viewed countless times in elementary school.  The movie could only have been made by people intimately experienced with all manner of illicit substances, because you would have to BE high to think this would make a kid anything but WILDY FASCINATED by drugs.  

Imagine it's 1995.  You walk into Mr. Potter's science class and see the AV cart at the front of the room.  You know the one, with the big ol' CRT television secured to the top with a nylon strap so it doesn't topple off and crush a child.  Are you watching a grainy VHS about seed germination, or the outer reaches of space?  Maybe.  Probably.  But if the stars align and it's your lucky day, it means you're in for the ride of your life:

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I've read about this Barkley marathon before, and there's an astonishing kernel of hubris deep in my brain that says "I could do that" but truly, who am I kidding?  I run 4 miles on a hilly but paved trail and act like I deserve a medal...I'm not sure I could manage the ensuing 96 miles, through the woods, in the dark.

A partial solar eclipse is in store for us in Nashville, but perhaps a total eclipse of my heart, nonetheless.

This is just extremely cool.  What a generous gesture from Tommy Orange.  Still waiting for my hold on his new book to come in.

I don't agree with everything in this scathing takedown of Curb's 12th season, but I will concede that this isn't LD's finest work.  It's still funny, but it is fair to say the grievances on which the plots are built feel like more and more of a stretch, or overly contrived.  Honestly, I'm waiting for a spinoff about Susie, because she steals every scene.  Her wardrobe never disappoints and always gives "Spirit Halloween for Bergdorf's," while her vocabulary would make a longshoreman blush. 

I used to turn up my nose at Stephen King, but that was before I read any Stephen King.  Now I am a proud stan for this prolific, wildly talented sicko.  I'm sure he's actually a great guy in real life, but damn does he take you to some dark places on the page.

NGL I didn't read this article, I just find the 90-dog-salute of it all to be delightful.  I sure as shit don't want to be alive at 90, but maybe when I hit 60 or 70 I'll get me a cat salute that is commensurate with my years of experience.

Analog Reading:

Finished If It Bleeds, a Stephen King story collection.  The titular story involved Holly Gibney, so of course I liked it.  However, being a novella, it felt rushed.  The capitulating action seemed to happen too quickly and too neatly.  I see now that King's books are long for a reason.  With the exception of The Stand, which really had a lot of extraneous description in it, I think he needs that space for his plots and his character development.

Read Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy, an Irish-American writer who survived Ewing's sarcoma as a child and spent decades enduring dozens of reconstructive surgeries on her jaw.  What I thought was so peculiar about this excavation of her experiences was that she had a twin sister that she barely mentions.  I don't recall if they were identical, but it seems to me that if your face was suddenly severely disfigured, and there was someone else still bopping around with the previous version of your face, that would factor heavily into your self-perception.  

Read Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, which is a memoir of her intense and perhaps codependent friendship with Lucy Grealy, spanning the entirety of their friendship, which began at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lasted until Grealy's heroin-related death at age 39.

Devoured (if you'll allow me the distasteful pun) Louder Than Hunger by John Schu.  It's a YA/middle grade novel in verse, so I read it in an afternoon, and boy did he manage to squeeze out some emotions with that deft economy of words.  

Started State of Wonder, also by Ann Patchett, but this time a work of fiction.  I need a little palate cleanser before I go back to Stephen King's dark universe to finally read Holly.

Syllabus #245

There should be a rule that the first week back to school after a holiday of a week or more should NOT be a full 5-day week.  When I grow up and become beneficent dictator of the world, I'm going to do something about that.  I might also do something about like, reproductive freedom, equal rights and freedoms for LGBTQIA+ individuals, universal healthcare, voting rights*, social safety nets, infrastructure...should I go on?  You get the picture.  But first thing's first.

*yes, in my beneficent dictatorship, voting rights are still important

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Oprah has come a long way from her "wagon of fat" days.  As someone who has never objectively been fat by medical standards, I don't think my opinion counts for anything in this whole diabetes-medicine-as-cosmeceutical revolution.  But I'd like to weigh in, if I may.  Pun fully intended, will not be apologizing.  If I existed in a much larger body, I would be tempted to take these.  But I'd be so scared about taking them, loving the results, and then being forced to stay on the drugs forever.  What if I can no longer afford them, or they become unavailable to me for some other reason?  

Not the same thing at all, but I have noticed my hair at the crown of my head and around my hairline has been kind of thin maybe forever but definitely after I had a major stress-shedding event around the Fall of 2021.  I thought about using supplements or serums.  I did a lot of research.  I even asked the dermatologist (probably not the best person to ask, but who else would you ask?  Actual question because I don't know).  And, partly because I am a cheapskate, I never pulled the trigger.  But the larger reason was that everything I read suggested that once you stop using whatever treatment, all that new growth falls out eventually and you're back to where your bald ass started.  

Reading about this guy almost makes me want to watch SNL.  Except then I'd have to figure out how to stream it from wherever.  And it would also mean actually watching TV, an activity to which I currently devote less than 1 hour a week.  Not out of any kind of moral superiority.  I honestly wish I cared more about movies and TV so I had normal-person things to bring up in conversation with casual acquaintances.  I just cannot bring myself to have an interest, outside of Curb Your Enthusiasm (in its final season) or Righteous Gemstones (which is between seasons).  

Also, I think I have watched exactly 4 movies in the last 2 years:  Love Actually (twice during Christmas break), The Goonies, Saltburn, and the first 3/4 of the Weird Al biopic starring Daniel Radcliffe (thrice, without managing to ever remain conscious for the last half hour or so).  So if anyone wants to talk about Larry David sittng in his car and yelling the c-word at Siri, or the bathtub and/or graveyard scenes from Saltburn, I'm your gal.  Otherwise, I hope you like to read, or we should probably just make small talk about the weather and go our separate ways.

One thing about me is that I love a good class-action lawsuit.  The best part is that I'll sign right up for it, promptly forget about it, and then months or years later, I get a check in the mail that just drops into my hot little hands like manna from heaven.  And then instead of treating myself to something fun, I just stick it right in my savings account, because I don't know how to live.  At all. 

Analog Reading:

Finished The Outsider by, who else, Stephen King.  I keep saying he is at his best when his plots remain planted in reality, even though he's known for supernatural horror.  This book veered into the supernatural pretty late in the game, but that's also when my best gal Holly Gibney showed up, so I'll allow it.  I really enjoyed this one, somewhat to my surprise.  I mean, I'm never surprised to enjoy a Stephen King book, but I generally prefer when the horror is perpetrated by humans or exists within someone's mind, rather than originating with actual supernatural forces.  ALSO, Steve gets a cookie for this one because I cannot recall one solitary usage of the n-word.

Since I can't get enough Holly, now I'm reading If It Bleeds.  I keep picturing Holly as the actress who plays Aurelia in Love Actually.  Aside from the fact that that actress is Portuguese and may or may not speak English, she gives the right amount of skinny, twitchy, self-contained, homeliness.  But, as you know, my movie references are rather limited.

Syllabus #244

We've Spring Breaked.  We broke Spring.  Spring is broken.  Spiritually, that is.  Official Spring won't hit until Tuesday, but in our hearts and minds, we're already there.

I enjoyed a nice visit with the parentals, I walked, I ran, I zoomed in on lots of flowers.  My sleep schedule is still all messed up from the time change, and then driving back and forth between Central and Eastern time.  Monday morning will be a real treat.

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What this article about bewbs fails to mention is the proportionality of it all.  Are Sweeney's boobs objectively that big, relative to boobs everywhere?  Probably not.  But relative to her own tiny body?  Yep, they're tig ol' biddies.

This NYT roundup of the funniest novels since Catch-22 was ever so useful.  My TBR list in my public library account grew by half a dozen books, thankyouverymuch.

I'm not sure if this link will render properly, but Saturday's New York Times Daily newsletter had some real gems in it.  The mini-essay about baseball was a treat.

Analog Reading:

Finished Tripping on Utopia:  Margaret Meade, The Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science.  It was ultimately pretty meh.  I was intrigued by the topic, and the content itself was not uninteresting.  However, the structure of the book jumped around from topic to topic and just skimmed the surface of each moment in time in such an unsatisfactory way.  Also, there were a few central figures in the book, aside from Margaret Meade, and then a whole mess of people who would be introduced for a short passage and then never spoken of again.  It was hard to get invested in the overarching story while constantly trying to remember who was who.  Obviously, there were a ton of people involved in this movement that spanned multiple decades, but the book would have been more engaging if it had narrowed its focus and delved deeper into fewer aspects of the time period.  This felt like the entire contents of a survey course shoved into less than 300 pages of reading.

Now reading yet another book by my old pal Steve King:  The Outsider.  This is separate from the Mr. Mercedes trilogy, but promises to bring back my best girl Holly Gibney.  I started it yesterday and have already read over 160 of the ~650 pages.  It's gripping.  It's horrific.  It will almost certainly take a whiplash inducing turn that I could never see coming.  But so far, zero n-words have been used in the production of this book.  I mean, there's still time, but I'm rooting for Steve here.  You can do it.  Just cut that word out of your writing cold turkey, homeslice.

Syllabus #243

I'm disgruntled.  I'm disgruntled and I'm never going to get gruntled about this one thing for as long as I live.  I probably say this every year, but Carson Daly and the fine folks at MTV sold us youngs a bill of goods back in the 90s with their MTV Spring Break specials.  Never once in all my years of adulthood has Spring Break found me standing knee-deep in a pool, looking hot, bronzed, and oiled, surrounded by scores of my nearly-nude peers as we bounce to the illest beats.  

Do I actually want that?  Absolutely not!  But it was promised to me as destiny, and I feel cheated.

I'll tell you what I actually want out of Spring Break, and it would make for terrible television, which is why I never thought to want it until well into my 30s.  I want it to be sunny, and just warm enough to go out in a light jacket and pants, not so hot that I'm sweating in my jorts.  That's summer, save it for later, andplusalso I don't want to have to shave my alarmingly pallid legs that thoroughly just yet.  I want several consecutive days of having no chores to do.  My only obligation is to exist.  Eat.  Read.  Go for luxuriously long walks and look at little flowers growing in people's yards.  Discover the perfect microdose* of my pot brownies so I can be high but not so high that I fall asleep as soon as it hits.  

*I have achieved success on this front, after extensive research!  The correct amount is 1/16th of a square, which is 1/16th of a pan.  I am a cheap date.  At my current rate of consumption, which is once or twice a week, one tray of brownies would last me nearly 3 years.  Don't worry, though.  I'm sure they'd be ok in the freezer for that long, just from a food safety perspective, but somebody else eats a whole dang square all at once, which is honestly a little disturbing.  I feel like that amount would put me in some kind of state of psychosis.

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Tommy Orange's new book sounds excellent.  Can't wait for my library hold to come in.  

Show me your kitties!  I might have to try this at the end of the year, but I will have to be very deliberate about branding.  Also, Mr. Homer doesn't speak for all of us.  He might not have a high bun, but you can pry mine from my cold dead scalp.

Mr. Homer said that using cats as the vehicle to forgive patrons for losing or damaging books or other borrowed items could help to soften the stereotype of the stern librarian.

“We don’t really have the high buns and ‘shush’ people anymore,” he said. “We are still book lovers, cardigan lovers and cat lovers.”

Just another reason to not go to the movies!  The idea of shoving my fist into that grimacing plastic orifice only to extract kernels of corn makes me want to launch my body into the sun.

I like big pants and I cannot lie.  I'm here for the ebbs and flows of fashion, but one thing I will never again embrace is the ultra low rise pant.  My hip bones do not yearn to breathe free.  My pubes do not need to play peekaboo with the waistline of my pants.  I have neither a tramp stamp nor the whale-tail of a thong to expose above the back of my pants - just an unadorned, unadulterated asscrack.  I have tasted the sweet freedom of high-rise jeans and I will not be denied.  I will no longer wear pants that have to be tightly belted or constantly hiked up into place lest they fall dangerously low on my woefully scant cheeks.  

Analog Reading:

Finished End of Watch.  Man.  Even though the underlying premise of the story (telekinetic mind control via a hypnotizing demo video on a hacked handheld video game console) was a little bit corny, Stephen King is a masterful enough storyteller that I was able to, if not suspend my disbelief, at least compensate for it and get sucked into the plot.  I just love the Holly Gibney character so much, and can't wait to read the remaining three books in which she's featured.

Read People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry.  It's not the sort of thing I'd usually seek out, but it was fun.  A fluffy counterpoint to any Stephen King novel, that's for sure.  I did get kind of tired of the two protagonists' 12 years of sexual tension buildup, just from a practical standpoint.  Like, shit or get off the pot here, folks!  If you would both just use your words like grownups, you wouldn't be playing these will-they-won't-they games for over a decade!  But then, of course, there'd be no story.  Perhaps better in real life, but not in book form.

Now I've pivoted back to non-fiction with Tripping on Utopia:  Margaret Meade, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen.  Tripping balls in the 1930s - who knew?!

Syllabus #242

I rejoined the land of the living this week.  I tested negative the morning I was allowed to return to work, which was a relief.  I wouldn't have felt good being in close proximity with people, even wearing a mask.  But I felt like that clean bill of health gave me permission to not wear a mask.  I hope I'm not a monster for that?  But the thought of having to deal with fogged up glasses and a swampy face and sore ears for 8 hours a day just made me wanna go back to bed.  Also, every time I put on an N95 I'm transported back to the time I had food poisoning and projectile vomited into a mask on a Portuguese tour bus.

uh-oh spaghetti-o

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This brief musing on what constitutes "American style" seems wildly optimistic to me.  If I were asked to describe American fashion, I think the thing that stands out the most is our willingness, nay, penchant, for going out in public in pajamas or exercise clothes.  I am guilty of the latter, but usually only because I actually plan to exercise after running an errand and don't want to get changed twice.  But leaving the house in pajamas would really be crossing the Rubicon for me.  I don't get that one.  And where do you draw the line?  Are they the pajamas you already slept in, or the ones you're going to sleep in?  Surely not both, right?  Like you didn't sleep in them, wear them out in public, and then get back in bed in the same dusty ass clothes, right?  If that's your journey, I guess you have larger problems to contend with than your sartorial choices, but like, if you're going to get changed at some point, why not before you leave the house?

Eagerly awaiting the new Sally Rooney book!  I normally wouldn't say, in March, that I'm already looking forward to September (as we all know July is the pinnacle of any teacher's calendar year) but I will be excited to read Intermezzo.

This is an interesting perspective on policing the use of language.

RIP Richard Lewis.  The origin story of his friendship with Larry David is just perfect.  

Analog Reading:

Finished the utterly brutal but all too realistic Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.  The slowly-then-all-at-once creep of a violent, authoritarian regime seems to be a regrettably plausible scenario.

Reading the also utterly brutal but entirely unrealistic End of Watch  by Stephen King.  It's the 3rd book in the Mr. Mercedes trilogy.  I have become quite fond of Bill Hodges and Holly and Jerome.  I am not fond of King's stubborn refusal to find ways to show that a character is racist without using the n-word.  Also, I wonder if he has ever met a Black person in real life.  In one scene, he sets up a description of a bad neighborhood by describing some young Black guys on a street corner selling drugs and playing hacky sack between drug deals.  If you, like me, thought hacky sack was one of the whitest things a person could do besides not use a washcloth*, you're not wrong.  I am ashamed to admit that I googled 'black people and hacky sack' just to see, and the first result was this comedy sketch about the world's only Black hacky sack player.

*for the record, I do use a washcloth, and was surprised and amused when I learned of this stereotype, but have since learned that it is surprisingly valid