Sunday, February 27, 2022

Syllabus #141

Breaking news - I drank like 1.5 beers yesterday and I have a headache today.  We were out at a bar and there was this large group of young people all dressed up like old people - gray wigs, canes, sweater vests, pearls, all of it.  I almost asked them what was up with the costumes, but I was so afraid they would tell me it was someone's 30th birthday that I just let the mystery be.  

Perhaps I should have pulled a fake grandma aside and asked anyway, and imparted some words of elder wisdom from the other side.  Drink all you can now, I would have whispered, clutching their arm with my gnarled, liver spotted hands.  One day, you'll wake up with a hangover just from watching a Whiteclaw commercial that played before your cardio barre video on YouTube and you'll realize it's all over for you now.




Let it be known to all and documented here in print, that on Sunday, February 20 in the year of our Lort two thousand and twenty two, Andy raved about a vegetarian meal.  I made this mushroom stroganoff, and after making all the requisite masturbation puns, he tucked in and enjoyed the hell out of it.  His exact words were, "This is the best non-meat meal I've had in a really long time."  I almost wish we had an Alexa eavesdropping on our every utterance just so I would have another witness to this miracle #blessed.


I don't have suitcase packing anxiety, but I have major leaving-the-cats-alone-in-the-house anxiety.  I just worry about them constantly.  Are they sad?  Are they lonely?  Is Charlie bothering them?   Are they safe?  What if there's severe weather?  What if they are rolling around on the floor with their little paws tucked under their chins, making little mew noises and being heart-shatteringly adorable and I'm not there to witness it??


This is completely demented and cruel, not to mention illogical.  


All this new fiction set during covid times.  Writing about it through the darkest depths of that time must have been an ordeal.  I only barely feel ready to read about it, but a lot of these books sound compelling.  I've already read The Sentence and Our Country Friends (which was probably a mistake to read in Portugal when I was so worried about getting omicron and then getting stuck there). 


Boozy Mountain Dew, released to a highly exclusive consumer audience of three states only.  TO WHAT do we owe the pleasure?  Just don't mix it up with your regular Mountain Dew and put it in your baby's bottle.  


Analog Reading:

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.  The story shifted back and forth between a literal, paranormal haunting, and the existential haunting of cultural legacies.  By the end, I was sorry to say goodbye to the characters.  I kind of wanted to keep hanging out, and maybe apply for a job at their bookstore.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.  Oh god I can't put it down.  It's a damn good thing I didn't read this book before covid or I would have probably thrown myself off the roof of our apartment building in March 2020.  But now that things in our actual pandemic have turned out to be less horrific than the aftermath of Station Eleven's Georgia Flu, it's a fascinating read.  I've always liked books about how people attempt to rebuild civilization after an apocalyptic event, and this one does not disappoint, even though it's a little too real.

Sunday, February 20, 2022

Sunday in the Park

 Vignettes from a Sunday stroll through Shelby Park:


This is an old picture, don't get too excited, it's still winter, we have no leaves yet


Two middle-aged French people, one dressed like a Normcore dad, the other a woman with a rat-tail, wearing buffalo plaid flannel onesie pajamas.


Ten-year old going for a scoot in his church clothes, looking like he was auditioning for the off-off-off-Broadway production of Richie Rich the musical.


Grown man on rollerskates, looking like he couldn't wait for the DJ at Skater's Choice to cut the couples' skate crap and put the jams back on.


Barefoot goth couple doing their best to look pissed off about the sun, probably thinking about sacrificing a cat.

Syllabus #140

Oops, we skipped a week.  I hope you invoked the 15-minute rule and bounced on out of here last week when you realized your maestra wasn't coming.  Last Sunday I was busy plodding through the snow to a train station in Philly, riding the train to the airport, and then wondering if I would just live in the airport forever as I watched our flight get delayed, and delayed again.  We eventually boarded, broke a tow bar pushing back from the gate, got the tow bar fixed, sat on the tarmac for so long I fell asleep and thought we had already landed in Nashville, de-iced, and flew on home.  

The pilot was all, 'Sorry for the wait, we're going to make up for some of that lost time in the air.'  And it's like, if you can fly faster, why don't you just do that all the time?  Shut up about your carbon footprint, the planet is dying no matter what, so I'm in a hurry.  You gonna get a speeding ticket?  It's literally the sky.  The autobahn of the troposphere.  Luftbahn?  Point is, pedal to the metal, homes, we got places to be.  

By Monday morning, I was so tired from a weekend packed with more non-family socialization than I can recall in over two years that I had to take a rapid test.  I tested positive for extreme introversion.  





I've been doing the Wordle, and the Worldle, and the Spanish wordle every day.  It's why I get out of bed every morning.  I mean, the lure of the Wordle, or you know, the sound of a cat vomiting, or the imperative to shower, dress, and exit the house to procure a paycheck.  But mostly the Wordle.  But the Spanish wordle is somehow my jam.  Maybe there are more predictable and regular patterns in the way letters appear in Spanish words, but I don't care, it makes me feel smart.  Sometimes, though, I guess the correct word and I have no idea what it means, so I look it up.  The other day, the correct answer was albur, which was unfamiliar, so I went over to ye olde Google Translate.  And now I know albur is Spanish for dace.  Of course, of course, dace, right.  Can't wait to use that totally real word in a sentence, I thought.  Except then I realized I had no earthly idea WTF 'dace' means.  

If you care, it's a small freshwater fish related to the minnow.


Your mileage may vary with childhood therapy.  At least the way therapy was done back in the day.  Going to the "divorce group" with the guidance counselor in elementary school wasn't officially therapy, I suppose, but I think it warped me more than it helped me.  It never occurred to me to feel ashamed or othered by that situation until I was pulled out of class with the kids who were always in trouble or getting pulled out for remedial classes.  I thought I must have done something wrong, and then I found myself sitting in a trailer, like we weren't even good enough to congregate inside the school building, being encouraged to bitch about how awful it was to have divorced parents when, in reality, I was like, AYFKM?  Now I get to hang out with my grandmom every day and she always has a bowl full of good chocolate candy (miss me with those butterscotches), she lets me unload her pantry and play 'store,' and nobody passes out drunk on the floor in front of a giant wooden box TV with a sleeve of Ritz and a gallon of milk so it's sour by the time I'm tryna have my Rice Krispies in the morning.  Sounds like a win to me, Mrs. Halscheid.  Thank you for making me an unwitting participant in the trauma porn, but I'd like to return to class to make sure my deskmate hasn't vomited all over my things from crying so hard because Mrs. Summerill was a terrifying ice demon who shouldn't have been allowed to teach death row inmates let alone 1st graders.  So what I'm trying to say is, botched amateur group therapy made me need real therapy.


I don't know, man.  Changing your personality sounds like it requires effort.  Can't we just like, speak to a manager and demand an exchange?  Isn't there a pill for that?  I'm sure a lot more agreeable and extroverted, and less neurotic, after 3/4 of a glass of wine.  Can we just make it socially acceptable to microdose the sauce?  Because any more than that for me and things start to get weird.  Not to mention how delightful I am the next day when I'm Linda Blair-ing it, crawling down the stairs with my head on backwards and projectile vomiting everywhere.  On second thought, why would I ever want to change that winning personality?


Analog Reading:

Finished The Every by Dave Eggers.  I loved The Circle and this follow-up novel, even though both made me feel deeply uncomfortable about my own use of technology.  They made me think more critically about what I willingly give up in exchange for convenience or entertainment purposes.

Read You, Too, Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman.  1 out of 5 stars, do not recommend.  It was painful.  It was inventive and I appreciate what she was trying to do with a sort of surreal meditation on the impact of media on female body image, but it just felt awful to push through it.  The extended sequences of describing bizarre TV commercials in detail made me feel the same level of fury I feel when I'm trying to read or have a conversation and a TV that no one is actively watching is droning on in the background.  Ugh.  I should have bailed on this one.  What a waste of my reading life.  

Now reading Louise Erdrich's The Sentence and I'm enjoying it so far.  I haven't read any of her previous novels and I've seen some chatter that this one isn't her best, but I'm along for the ride at this point.  She gets bonus points for writing herself into the story as a peripheral character.  It's whimsical.  Don't we need a little more whimsy in the world?  Especially in a book that starts out with the main character stealing a dead body in the name of unrequited love?

Sunday, February 6, 2022

Syllabus #139

We had a maybe not entirely necessary but absolutely deserved snow day on Friday.  After this, we have only one inclement weather day left to use this year before we have to extend the school year, so we have to be strategic with how we deploy this, the last of our Super Mushrooms.  NGL, when the weather finally turns nice and we no longer have a prayer for a snow day, I'm going to miss the audacity of students (and parents, and even teachers, sometimes) openly tweeting at the school district demanding a snow day.

Secret notsecret: No child ever wants a snow day as badly as the teachers do, we (well, most of us) just have the good sense not to @ the school district with these hilarious but wildly inappropriate demands.


No me digas


Yo this sauce sounds delicious but can we rename it?  Alabama white sauce sounds sounds like a euphemism for something that belongs in a condom, not on my condiment shelf. 


Margaret Renkl with scathing commentary about the gerrymandering of Nashville's congressional districts.  It's a trash fire and a tragedy.  


Part of this satirical send-up of a day-in-the-life of a librarian are so painfully accurate, and the other parts I just want to throttle the author and shout "First rule of librarian fight club - we don't talk about librarian fight club!" because homeboy is giving up some state secrets there.


This kid!  Nobody told him that isn't how self publishing works, but that hasn't stopped him.  I love it.


This folksy anecdote from Lindsey Graham about running into three of his salt-of-the-earth pickup truck driving constituents at the dump says more about the lack of basic services provided in semi-rural areas of his backwards state than it does about the purported will of the people.  I have suffered the indignity of having to regularly haul my garbage to a remote facility because I lived just slightly outside the city limits (of what could only charitably be called a city and only in South Carolina) and I'm here to tell you that it stinks both figuratively and literally.  And addressing the stat from the article that the vast majority of truck owners have never used the bed to haul anything, I'm sure that's fully accurate for the inexplicable truck owners in urban areas and suburban hellscapes.  But in rural South Carolina, had I the luxury of owning a truck, I would have used the shit out of that truck bed, regularly, as it would have been far preferable to shoving hefties of rotting food scraps and soiled cat litter in the trunk of my Honda on a biweekly basis.  I mean I still would have had to drive 25 minutes each way past rusty, windowless trailers flying that old southern cross, which I always felt was a helpful reminder to keep my gas tank full lest I never break down in their terrifying vicinity.  


Analog Reading:

Finished The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen.  It was brutal and violent but also philosophical and had a bit of a twist ending that wasn't exactly satisfying but felt like closure.

Read Velorio  by Xavier Navarro Aquino.  It's a novel about the attempted formation of a utopian community in the center of the island of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.  I came for the utopia (which always fails), I stayed for the plentiful sprinkling of Spanish dialogue, I almost gave up because while it was overall less violent than The Committed, the violence and horrific treatment of corpses was happening to and among children.  It also seemed to toe the line between realism and magical realism and the uncanny valley between what I was supposed to take literally vs. not was kind of disturbing to me.

The Every by Dave Eggers.  About 1/5 of the way through this one, and while this one is for sure just as dystopian as Velorio, at least the violence is only psychological, and everything is clean and shiny.  The only maggot-infested corpse here is the concept of privacy and autonomy.

Friday, February 4, 2022

2021 -The Year That Wasn't: A Recap

 


Who among us would claim to have the barest grasp on how time works?  I used to have a very clear image in mind of the progression of time through the seasons and year after year.  Now I can't even tell you what day it is or whether something happened yesterday or six months ago.  We're all damaged!  

Case in point, I know I did some things in 2021, and I even managed to go on a few trips, but all I can really tell you is that I read a lot of books.  I had pretty much no productive output.  I stayed alive, I ticked the boxes of being a productive member of society, but damn if it wasn't just one unending holding pattern.  Just when we thought it was clear to land, they were like, nope, buckle up, this twisted journey isn't over yet!  

And now here we are and it's somehow February, even though we were all sure for a minute there it would be January 32nd every day for the rest of our lives.  So let me just take a moment to brag about this baller spreadsheet I made for all the books I read last year.  Don't hate because you ain't.


TitleAuthorGenreOther
Fleishman is in TroubleTaffy Brodesser Aknerfiction
Kim Ji Young, Born 1982Cho Nam-jufiction
The Undocumented AmericansKarla Cornejo Villavicencionon-fiction
embedded journalism
Rich and PrettyRumaan Alamfiction
CleannessGarth Greenwellfiction
reads like a memoir, TFG this was fiction, sweet lord
Death in Her HandsOtessa Moshfeghfiction
Deacon King KongJames McBridefiction
Little EyesSamantha Schweblinfiction
The Sea WifeAmity Gaigefiction
The Midnight LibraryMatthew Haigfictionbook club
The Best of MeDavid Sedarisnon-fiction
essay collection, humor
MonogamySusan Millerfiction
Real LifeBrandon Taylorfiction
The Children's BibleLydia Milletfiction
SistersDaisy Johnsonfiction
Greetings from New NashvilleSteve Haruch (editor)non-fictionessay collection
Shuggie BainDouglas Stuartfiction
Leave the World BehindRumaan Alamfiction
Everywhere You Don't BelongGabriel Bumpfiction
MediocreIjeoma Oluonon-fiction
MemorialBrian Washingtonfiction
NomadlandJessica Brudernon-fiction
The Life of the MindChristine Smallwoodfiction
Winter PastureLi Juannon-fiction
Big TimeJen Spyrafictionstory collection
No One is Talking About ThisPatricia Lockwoodfiction
Fake AccountsLauren Oylerfiction
The Upstars HouseJulia Finefictionbook club
Between Two KingdomsSuleika Jaouadnon-fictionmemoir
Selfish, Shallow and Self AbsorbedMeghan Daum (editor)non-fictionessay collection
Notes from the Bathroom LineAmy Solomon (editor)non-fictionhumor collection
Festival DaysJo Ann Beardhybrid
essay collection, story collection
How to be a FamilyDan Koisnon-fictiontravel, memoir
Crying in H MartMichelle Zaunernon-fictionmemoir
The Great BelieversRebecca Makkaifiction
Leaving Isn't the Hardest ThingLaruen Houghnon-fictionmemoir
The Secret Lives of Church LadiesDeesha Philyawfictionstory collection
The SympathizerViet Thanh Nguyenfiction
Somebody's DaughterAshley C. Fordnon-fictionmemoir
The Wreckage of My PresenceCasey Wilsonnon-fictionmemoir
The BodyBill Brysonnon-fiction
The Silent PatientAlex Michaelidesfiction
The MothersBrit Bennettfiction
This Will All Be Over SoonCecily Strongnon-fictionmemoir
The Book of EelsPatrik Svenssonnon-fiction
Better to Have Gone: Love, death, and the quest for utopia in AurovilleAkash Kapurnon-fiction
Late Migrations: A natural history of love and lossMargaret Renklnon-fictionmemoir
Klara and the SunKazuo Ishigurofiction
Beautiful World, Where Are You?Sally Rooneyfiction
A Swim in a Pond in the RainGeorge Saundershybrid
essay collection, story collection
Sag HarborColson Whiteheadfiction
Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside ClothesPhoebe Robinsonnon-fictionmemoir
OligarchyScarlett Thomasfiction
Conversations with FriendsSally Rooneyfiction
IntimaciesKatie Kitamurafiction
Graceland, At LastMargaret Renklnon-fictionmemoir
This is Your Mind on PlantsMichael Pollannon-fiction
Harlem ShuffleColson Whiteheadfiction
CrossroadsJonathan Franzenfiction
Last Picture ShowLarry McMurtryfiction
PiranesiSusannah Clarkefiction
Topics of ConversationMiranda Popkeyfiction
A Carnival of SnackeryDavid Sedarisnon-fiction
essay collection, humor
Our Country FriendsGary Shteyngartfiction
Machines Like MeIan McEwanfiction