Syllabus #21

Your syllabus is coming at you a few days later than usual this week.  I hope this won't negatively impact your evaluations.  I've been busy doing all the employment-related cliches:  working hard for the money, working for the weekend, let me work it put my thing down flip it and reverse it, working 9-5 (except actually more like 7:30-3:30).  You get the idea.

Last night I took Charlie for an evening walk.  It was almost pleasant, because at that hour, the children, other dogs, squirrels, buses, and delivery vehicles are all dormant and Charlie and his basket of 10,000 anxieties can trot beside me in relative tranquility.  The 95 degree heat of the day had abated to a bone-chilling low 80s by that point, and a mere two blocks away, I could hear the marching band of Oprah's high school alma mater playing at the Friday night football game.  It was one of those simple Kurt Vonnegut "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is," moments.  That, or tequila is a helluva drug.*

Here's an un-curated smorgasbord of reading material for this week.  Just like an all-you-can-eat buffet, you can pile on a little bit of everything but you'll probably feel terrible afterwards.

BORING.  What is the point of summer camp without hair-raising campfire tales and heavy petting in the woods?  Actually, I only ever went to church camp so I got neither of those experiences.  Though, if you think about it, a story about a guy getting brutally murdered and then coming back from the dead to haunt his friends a few days later is pretty terrifying.  Christianity pretty much has the market cornered on that plot line.  Also, one of the counselors told us a story about a guy on a camping trip who was so dumb that when he ran out of toilet paper, his friend told him to just use a dollar to wipe and he ended up with four quarters jammed up his ass.  But that was at the dinner table and not around a campfire, so I'm pretty sure the function of that story was to distract us all from how inedible the camp food was.

This lesbian astronaut custody dispute has made-for-TV movie written all over it. 

I think I'm more terrified of Lyme disease than any other ailment I could possibly encounter.  It's such a murky diagnosis and so many sufferers are basically gaslit by doctors for years before they make any progress. 


How to be sober?  Just shut up about it.  But how will everyone know how on-trend I am if I can't 'Gram my cute mocktails and artfully packaged non-alcoholic craft beers? 


I must be getting old because I thought this was...funny?  None of his barbs were over the top, and they weren't exactly mean spirited.  He just seemed bemused by a youth culture that he obviously doesn't belong to, and people love to see themselves reflected in comedy, even when they are the butt of the joke.  Why do you think so many white people watched Chappelle's Show? 

Reading:

Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz - I wish I had read this book and his recently published Spying on the South when we lived in South Carolina.  Nashville is still obviously the south, but it is culturally much more progressive and recognizable to my northern sensibilities.  South Carolina was complete culture shock for me, nearly impenetrable in terms of understanding people's beliefs and customs.

Flow:  The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim  - This book was published in 2009, before the current wave of period underwear and the resurgence in popularity of contraptions like the Diva Cup, but there's a wealth of historical information about how women handled their periods.  Aside from being isolated for ritual uncleanliness, which most of us know about, the most appalling detail so far is that before the advent of commercial blood-absorbing products, sometimes women factory workers just worked standing up and free-bled on floors covered in a deep layer of hay which was periodically mucked out like they were no better than livestock.  Just typing that made me throw up in my mouth a little.

Sick by Porochista Khakpour - I've fallen down a Lyme rabbit hole and this memoir by a writer and college professor living with chronic Lyme is fascinating and terrifying.

*Mom, calm down, I wasn't drunk, I had 2 palomas 3 hours before this walk, followed by a giant dinner and ice cream, everybody be cool, I'm not stumbling around drunk in the darkness with Charlie as my only protection.