Sunday, April 28, 2019

Syllabus #6

Here we are.  Here's what I was consuming instead of composing original content this week:

I made the mistake of reading this article the morning of a dentist appointment.  Fortunately, my oral hygiene is impeccable and every dentist I've ever patronized as an adult has fawned over my beautiful teeth.  I guess you have to really have a hardon for teeth to express such a strong opinion (or be a dentist in the South, where having all your teeth is an accomplishment unto itself), but they're all accounted for, straight enough, and white enough*, so I'll take it.  I guess the expander and braces that made me the envy of the entire 7th grade paid off, so thanks for that, mom.  Also, thanks for not feeding me a bottle of Mountain Dew in my crib every night.

*The only time a gathering of multiple dozens of straight, white things should rewarded by society is when we're talking about teeth

Speaking of things only tangentially related to dentistry:  Dental dams, can you handle it?  Have you ever seen one?  If you did, did you mistake it for a fruit roll up?  In a pinch, can you use a fruit roll up as a dental dam?  What about that reusable beeswax stuff that we're supposed to be using in place of plastic wrap so the earth doesn't spontaneously combust before all my friends' kids are old enough to vote?  Asking for a friend.

 Oh good,  looks like I'm very on trend, as usual.  I knew if I just kept posting uncurated, unflattering trash on Instagram everyone would realize how cool that is.  Because not caring about being cool makes you cool, right?



Have you ever had weird conversations with Trader Joes cashiers?  I've had more weird experiences at Publix, to the point where I stopped shopping there.  They always wanted to know what I was going to make with the ingredients I was buying, which I guess is not entirely out of line, but invariably I would be buying ingredients that seemed foreign, if not extraterrestrial, to the South Carolinian teenager scanning my groceries.  Like, I get it, I'm cooking a dinner that you can't order from the Bojangles drive-through and that's going to raise some eyebrows.

The most awkward scenario arose when I was buying ear plugs, cat food, and a cucumber.  That's it.  Pretty standard, cut and dry case of, "Hope you got the SPCA on speed dial because I'm going home to do some unspeakable things to my cat."  Or, you know, we were out of cat food, I was making a salad, and Andy was going on a business trip and sharing a hotel room with a guy who snores.  But NOBODY asks "what are you doing with all this stuff?" and expects such a boring, logical answer.  Clearly, the only way to keep the magic alive without getting arrested for animal sodomy was to say, "Oh, you don't wanna know," and then never returning to that Publix, ever.


Offline Reading:  Too much at the moment, an abbreviated list
  • Lindy West's Shrill - I like how frank she is about topics relating to women's bodies.  I mean, that's kind of her whole stock in trade, but she's good at it, and she's funny as hell.  
  • Elena Ferrante's Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - The 3rd book in the Neapolitan novel tetralogy.  It's interesting to read this book at the same time as Shrill because it's another window into a woman's inner life and complex feelings about how to navigate her relationships and body, but from an entirely different time period and cultural milieu.  
  • The May issue of Oprah - duh
  • Lonely Planet Ecuador - gathering ideas for our trip this summer
  • Anna Burns' Milkman - Having a hard time getting into this one, to be honest, but I'm giving it a shot
  • Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone:  A therapist, her therapist, and our lives revealed - Haven't actually started reading this yet, but the author was on Fresh Air and Terry could pull an interesting conversation out of a pet rock, so naturally the book sounded interesting
Listening:



So You've Decided to Purchase a Cassowary: 


Monday, April 22, 2019

The Syllabus #5

This week, I bring you the repetitive, the unsurprising, the prurient, the delicious, and the expectedly hilarious but surprisingly insightful.  In that order.  Enjoy.

Back up on my bullshit.  More interesting perspectives about the eternal question - to be or not to be kinda buzzed most of the time?

Florida Man Falls Down Near Bird, Killed By Bird

I feel like RBG probably had a good time on the bench that day.  Behold, the first and only time it will ever sound a little bit fun to work at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

I want to go to there.

I'm nearly finished reading Chelsea Handler's new book, Life Will Be the Death of Me.  I was expecting it to be full of amusing anecdotes about her weird childhood and escapades with drugs and alcohol, and it does not disappoint.  However, I'm also learning a lot about the process of self-reflection and thinking maybe everyone should go to therapy?  It is somehow both more and less navel-gazey than the typical celebrity memoir, and there is a fair amount of generally applicable insight sandwiched in between stories about pilfering pharmaceuticals from her recently deceased mother, and Chow Chows high on Xanax running loose in the first-class cabin.

Millennial Guess Who:
Player 1: Did your person go to Coachella?
Player 2: No.
Player 1: *flips down Rachel* OK does your person smoke recreational meth, and are they tweaking their face off right now?
Player 2: Most definitely.
Player 1: Gotta be Sarah, then.


Saturday, April 20, 2019

Highku


Dear reader, I trust you've been enjoying the shit out of National Poetry Month.

Don't even tell me you haven't been celebrating.  The sacrilege.  I can't bear it.

If you've been a Poetry Month agnostic up to this point, open your heart and mind and consider my humble offering here.

As I have previously stated, we librarians have our fingers on the pulse of holidays and monthly recognitions that lend themselves to thematic book displays.  Last year, I was preparing just such a poetry display when I came across this absolute gem.   It’s a book of cat poems, because obviously.  But that's not what propels this book into the literary canon of my gnarled and tainted heart.  Look closely.




The illustrator.


Trina 
Schart 
Hyman

What the fuck, Trina?  Your agent couldn't talk you into doing a middle initial?  You had to go Full Schart Hyman?  That sounds like Yiddish for "how to get a UTI."

My favorite kind of poem is the limerick, for obvious reasons.  But the haiku is right up there in 2nd place, mostly because I don't actually know the rules for any other kind of poem, despite possessing a very expensive English degree.  But I have a strong affinity for the ancient Japanese art of saying weird shit as succinctly as possible.  For those of you not into the high brow vibes like me, a haiku is a three line poem where the first line has 5 syllables, the second line has 7, and the last line has 5 again.  

Why are we having a salty English lesson now, you might be wondering.  I didn't sign up for this, you're thinking.  It's ok, stick with me.  We're on a journey together.  Not only are we in the thick of National Poetry Month, but today just so happens to be the twentieth day of April.  420.  Doth sayeth the olds who are trying to sound down, because I'm pretty sure the kids don't say it.  They're too busy making vape juice in an InstaPot or rolling their faces off on Molly or doing some other drug that was just invented five minutes ago.  

But I digress.  It seems that 420 is kind of like Cinco de Mayo or 4th of July, in that the holiday is lazily named after the calendar date.  Similarly, people tend to celebrate without having a firm grasp of the significance of the holiday, and "celebrating" pretty much implies that you're on a mission to forget your own name before the stroke of midnight.

So in light of this fortuitous overlap of poetry month and marijuana’s birthday or whatever, I thought I’d share some of my favorite highkus.  It would help if you were in a celebratory state of mind, but I think they hold up regardless.  If I'm not named the next Poet Laureate of the United States, the system is rigged, is what I'm saying.

At your weed guy’s house 
Wishing you had brought some snacks 
Flaming hot cheetos

Here’s another, it’s kind of a cautionary tale:

Smoking from a roach 
Breathing fire in my lungs 
I’m a dragon now

This is about using responsibly:

Smoke weed second hand 
Shotgunning is kinda hot 
More bang for your buck

Who can resist a highku about loving animals:

Hotboxing my dog 
Think he might just be a narc 
He’s on prozac now

The follow-up, about hindsight and the futility of existence:

Who smoked all the weed? 

Why is the dog throwing up?

Guess he's not a narc 

And finally, we bring it full circle:

Weed guy's at my house
Glad I vacuumed yesterday 
He has high standards



Sunday, April 14, 2019

Dude Where's My Other Car


Something you need to know about me is how deeply horrified I am by the thought of wasting food.  Letting food go to waste deeply pains me, but not so much for altruistic reasons.  Intellectually, I know food waste is terrible for the environment and that we as a society throw out literal tons of perfectly good food that can feed hungry people when the right infrastructure exists to collect and distribute it.  Emotionally, though, watching a dining partner waste food feels like a) someone is slapping food out of my own hand and b) they are taking a plate full of change and small bills and just scraping it into the trash can.  I can hear the jingle of quarters and dimes and see that wad of mashed potato-smeared Washingtons right now.  It's not exactly rational, but that's me.  Cheapskate with weird food issues.  Put that on my tombstone.

I don't know why I feel this way, except that it may be influenced by growing up in my grandmother's house, where her formative eating habits were probably colored by the Depression and her position as the 2nd youngest of 6 kids.  Whatever the reason,  I am Team Clean Plate.  Food has to be really awful or presented in truly excessive quantities for me to tap out.  I have hurt myself in the interest of finishing an amount of food that wasn't quite enough to justify asking for a to-go box.  I have eaten pasta that was so gummy and undercooked the linguine noodles would barely bend enough to rest in the bowl, because the restaurant was expensive and there wasn't enough time to send the dish back.  I have eaten donuts out of a dumpster (which is a separate story unto itself) because they were there and, well, somebody had to eat them.

This obsessive attitude towards food waste as described thus far is really only a problem if I think it's a problem.  It's a sort of weird little mental space I occupy vis a vis mealtime, but it doesn't affect other people.  Here's where Andy would beg to differ, and honestly he's not entirely wrong (even just typing that pained me).  My aversion to food waste extends to things I will keep in the pantry or refrigerator, or try to force him to eat, long past what most humans would consider a reasonable expiration date.

If Andy were telling his side of the story (which he's not), he'd probably bring up the time I used way too much cayenne pepper in a pot of vegetarian chili but we ate it all anyway.  I'd interject and remind him of all the digestive benefits of capsaicin.  He'd probably mention the time I didn't stop him from swigging milk from a carton that had allegedly expired the day before and he was convinced that because it smelled a little funny he was going to die.  I'd point out the obvious outcome, which is that he was totally fine and is, in fact, still alive.  There have been debatably edible efforts at repurposing leftovers.  Pieces of bread with that little bit of fuzz scraped off.  Spices we purchased in Utah that somehow survived three moves and found their way into our Nashville pantry.  All this is to say, Andy is well aware of my tendencies, it's a recurring source of mild tension, and his armor is way up when it comes to expiration dates.

We made the mistake of buying a Mormon End Times size box of Nature Valley granola bars at Costco about two years ago.  At the time, we had plenty of pantry space and Andy was going on super long bike rides where he needed to carry carby snacks.  Turns out, those shits are loaded with sugar and are actually just crumbly shards of disappointment, so neither of us was eating them.  Fast forward to last month, when I was putting away groceries and had a Come to Marie Kondo moment and realized these granola bars did not spark joy and needed to go.  I checked the expiration, which was already fading to a pinprick 6 months behind us in the rearview mirror.

I had the brilliant and, for once, altruistic thought that I would bag up the granola bars and keep them in my car so I could hand them out to some of the legions of homeless people who hang out holding signs at just about every highway offramp in Nashville.  Andy thought that was straight up ignorant because I was giving our literal garbage to these economically disadvantaged people.  I felt vindicated the day I handed one out to a guy who thanked me profusely and acted like I presented him a Michelin starred steak dinner on a silver platter.  As it happens, though, I've only had that one opportunity so far, and I'm still driving around with this bag.  I either catch the green light or I'm sitting in a line of traffic far back from the person standing on the corner, and I don't want to actually chuck a granola bar at them as I'm driving by.  That would be ignorant.

That makes me a decent person, right?  Making a plan to prevent food waste by giving totally decent food to someone in need, and endeavoring to respect that person's dignity by not throwing it at them from the window of my car?  That's what I thought, at least.  But it turns out this plan brought me dangerously close to doing the most dick thing humanly possible.

The other day, I was driving Andy's car.  I caught the red light one car back from the corner of the highway offramp.  A guy I see every day was looking especially weathered on this hot, sunny day and I started to roll down my window to motion him over.  As the window was descending, I reached for my bag of granola bars.  The second I realized it wasn't there, I rolled the window back up, stared straight ahead and white knuckled the steering wheel.  Nothing to see here.  I hated myself so much in that moment.  I was a fraction of a second from looking a homeless man dead in the face and having to tell him, "Yes, good sir, I was going to give you some of my household GARBAGE, but do forgive me, I seem to have left it IN MY OTHER CAR!"



Friday, April 12, 2019

The Syllabus #4

It has been a week.  I thought it was Wednesday when it was only Tuesday, and by the end of Wednesday, it me:


Here's what I've been consuming, or abstaining from, depending on your perspective:

On so-called Millennials giving up alcohol, or at least scaling back dramatically - is it a totally unremarkable natural progression, or do we deserve participation trophies for showing up at practice for Team Moderation?


I love Rick Steves and I'm not ashamed to admit it.  He's invited to my hypothetical celebrity dinner party and he can sit between Terry Gross and Oprah.  I want to sit on Terry's other side, across from Oprah because I feel like Terry is better at conversations that don't require face-to-face positioning, but the full impact of an Oprah experience requires eye contact.  Between me and Oprah, there's a seat for David Sedaris.  Katie, party of 5, your table is ready.

If you think Rick Steves is just another milquetoast white dude of the PBS pantheon, perhaps these quotes from the article will hint at why he's such a treasure:

“I’m unapologetically proud to be an American,” he writes in the introduction to his book “Travel as a Political Act.” “The happiest day of any trip is the day I come home. ... But other nations have some pretty good ideas too.” That’s when he hits his audience with legal prostitution, high tax rates and universal health care...
Today, he is a board member of Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and a regular speaker at Hempfest. In his headquarters you will find a poster of the Mona Lisa holding a gargantuan spliff. 

Ahem.  You're welcome for me not stressing you out.

I've been reading I'll Be Gone in the Dark and it's stressing me out.  If you read a lot of true crime, do you get desensitized eventually?   I can't stop reading this book, but I also like not having night terrors.  Life is a balancing act, I guess. 

Sunday, April 7, 2019

On Being Insufferable


I did a dry January this year.  We returned home from Spain on New Year's Eve, after drinking at lunch and dinner, plus aperitivo hour and sometimes after-dinner drinks, every day for 9 days.  That might sound like Monday morning to some people, but I felt simultaneously saturated and desiccated, and completely gross.  

Drynuary (don't try to say that out loud, you will hate yourself) went so well that I’m still not drinking.  As I write this, it's April 6th, and I'm still clinging to the strap aboard the Teetotaler Express like somebody who failed to read the transit map and doesn't know which stop is hers.  I don't even miss drinking most of the time.  After a couple weeks I started to notice how I was feeling so much better...

...than everyone else.  


I really shouldn’t joke about sobriety, though.  Addiction is a legit serious medical issue, and anyone making a journey to recovery deserves tremendous respect, whether they appear to be struggling or thriving.  My own father, may he rot in peace, was a raging alcoholic who, to my knowledge, never tried to get better.  Unless "better" means cultivating a dependence on more expensive, potent forms of alcohol.  I have early childhood memories involving cans of Budweiser, but by the time he died, he was a Johnny Walker or GTFO kind of drinker.  As you might surmise, we never had a great relationship.  Maybe he was jealous... 


...because I was so much better than him.


Kidding.  Not really.  No but I'm joking.  But seriously.

Really, though, it’s been good to recalibrate and take a break from the old Sunday Morning Apology Tour where you try to peel back the curtain on last night’s brownout and figure out what you’ve done and who deserves an apology.  Fortunately, as far as I know, I’ve never done anything truly awful to another person or seriously injured myself, unless you count bursting capillaries in my face from puking so hard.  It's usually my liver, dignity, and wallet that I've violated, in that order.  And it’s not even like I would normally drink that much, or that often.  We're talking weekends only, rarely more than 3-4 drinks over the course of an evening, which was usually fine.  Not great, but not disastrous.  Except, you know, on those magical occasions when just one more or just go ahead and switch from red wine to whiskey sound like valid adult decisions.

I don't think I'm actually an alcoholic, but I do have a drinking problem, which is that I’m just really bad at it.

Drinking for me is like riding a roller coaster that is so shitty and dangerous that the engineers get sued, the amusement park becomes abandoned and haunted, and then R.L. Stine writes a Goosebumps book about it.   The booze coaster starts out with a rapid 30 foot ascent where everyone is waving their arms and having fun, but then the tracks enter a tunnel and plummet 200 feet into total darkness.  There’s a bunch of loops, at some point on the journey you get your picture taken and the results are super unflattering, and then the ride screeches back to the platform.   You unbuckle and stagger away to vomit uncontrollably for the next 18 hours.  When you finally stop puking up bile long enough to sit upright and eat a few saltines, you look at the photos and realize it was unwise to ride a roller coaster in a skirt, plus your purse was unzipped the whole time and now your wallet and keys are missing.  It’s an ordeal.  

All that is bad, and yet my biggest fear when I’m drinking is not that I’ll lose my wallet or binge eat an entire box of fiber cereal, because I’ve definitely done that more than once.  The fiber cereal, not losing my wallet.  If we're being honest here, Trader Joe's Bran Flakes are my binge of choice, drunk or sober.  I like a good clean colon is what I'm saying.  

But I digress.  My biggest drinking fear is that I’ll give in to my siren song.  We all have one, whether you realize it or not.  We all have these troubling impulses we don’t want to share with anyone.  It's that impulse to tiptoe up to the edge of the abyss and see what lies beyond.  It's a good hard stare into the Bucket of Truth, if you will.


Upright Citizens Brigade

Maybe your siren song is a literal edge, like when you lean over the railing of a 10th floor balcony and wonder if the person you push would have time to be mad before they hit the ground.  

Maybe your abyss is metaphorical, like when you’re scooping the litter box and your reptile brain spies those little Ferrero Rochers, those chocolate truffles with the crunchies on the outside, and you ask yourself, what if...no...but WHAAAT IIIIFFFFF?  

And there’s no coming back from that.  Once you give in to your siren song, whatever it is, your life is forever changed.   Some scars may be physical, some are mental, all are permanent.  You might be technically alive, but you’ll never be the same.  You’ll always carry that dirty little secret in your heart of darkness, and the burden will chip away at your soul until one day you’re at the dentist and the hygienist is elbow deep in your mouth with both hands, yet still trying to engage you in conversation, and she’s all, "Gee, I’m scraping a lot of staining from the backs of your teeth, do you drink a lot of coffee?  Red wine?" And you gag on all 10 of her fingers and whatever instrument of death she’s using to make your gums bleed, and you can’t hold it in any longer and you scream, "IT’TH CAT THIT, OKAY, IT’TH CAT THIT!"

And that's why it's important to floss, because it prevents tartar buildup and reduces the likelihood of confessing to deviant behavior while under duress.  

This post is sponsored by the American Dental Association.