Syllabus #149

This week was a blur.  There were preposterously large strawberries.  There was social interaction.  There was the inevitable First Head Cold I've Had In A Very Long Time that started out with a runny nose and quickly capitulated with the feeling that my head was going to detach from my body and float away, which unfortunately hit as we were finishing dinner and made for a very awkward exit from a restaurant.  It's not the rona, I have taken two rapid tests.  Just a regular old 'kids are disgusting and they breathe in my face daily' good old fashioned cold.

Speaking of kids being disgusting, this week is Book Fair week.  I can't wait to explain what sales tax is 837 times, and break hearts when I have to deliver the news that 3 nickels and 4 pennies is, in fact, 19 cents and not '7 monies.'

open heart surgery

Only a rich person with an externally vented range hood, who has also never worked at a job with a break room containing a shared microwave situation, would have any grounds to think this is acceptable. I'm almost as offended by Stephen King's microwaved salmon recipe as I am by his gratuitous use of the n-word in his fiction. 

This deromanticization of #vanlife came at the right time.  We regularly cycle through hypothetical ways to Damn the Man and drop out of society.  Scratch this one off the list.

Analog Reading:

Can you believe it?  I finished two books this week!  Back up on my book+ per week bullshit now that The Stand is in the rearview.  

Devil House by John Darnielle was great.  There was one sort of experimental blip in the middle that was printed in a font I found nearly impossible to read, and I didn't care fo that part.  Otherwise I thought it was a very intelligent meditation on how our cultural obsession with true crime actually impacts both the people connected to the events and the ones who write about them.

For a book club, I read Election by Tom Perrotta.  I hadn't read any of his work before, but apparently he has a knack for writing screen-adaptable fiction - he also wrote The Leftovers.  It was a quick romp, with some salacious bits, and some sadsack humor.  Set in a New Jersey high school in the 90's, I could vividly picture the characters.  We all knew a Tracy Flick, a Paul Warren.  Even a Jack Dexter.  I could smell the vice principal's coffee breath.  It was too real.  Then we watched the movie version, which, despite the excellent casting of Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick, lost a little bit of the luster for me.  Tracy was a little neutered and less of a secret sexpot in the movie version, and situating the action in Omaha instead of New Jersey made the whole thing seem a little too wholesome and All American.  The Book Was Better.

Syllabus #148

Late again!  Which reminds me of a joke that my mom reminded me of this past weekend (which is why I'm late, I was in South Carolina petting a very adorable puppy and also spending time with my parents, who are adorable in their own way, but I spent less time petting them, because that would be an insane thing to do).  It was a terrible joke that one of my guy friends told in the car when my mom was driving us somewhere in high school.  It was hilarious at the time for shock value, but in retrospect it honestly doesn't even make that much sense:

What's a thing that, when it's late, makes a teenage girl's mother scream, her father faint, and her mailman shoot himself?

Answer:  Her period.  

Like, who is out there banging their mailman?  I mean, yea, if they're a walking mail carrier, they have foine looking calves but this joke just doesn't resonate.  Is there some kind of Mr. McFeely fetish subculture out there?  If you, as a teenage girl, thirsted after the experience of getting Mr. MeFelt-up by the person (regardless of gender) who delivered your mail, please elaborate in the comments.

Anyway, please enjoy this baby dog, and also a sunset because it was pretty:

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My first email address was snoopymh1@aol.com, and I'm still chasing the "You've Got Mail!" dragon.  There's no other high quite like it.  I'm Team Email, for sure, but also Team Inbox Zero.  If you have triple digits of unread messages in your inbox, you're either way more Zen than I'll ever be, or the kind of careless person who accidentally leaves your baby in a hot car.  I said what I said.  

I don't even like mac and cheese, but Dolly makes it sound downright delightful.  

It seems to me that lying about your age on social platforms is more of a problem for creepers who want to lie about being younger to prey on minors, not people (like me) who still want some modicum of privacy and don't like giving out my birthdate on the internet because I don't want hollow birthday greetings from randos who would not have known my birthday if an algorithm hadn't reminded them.  If I want to identify as a 137 year old, let me be, you rapscallions.

Hold on, I gotta get on the horn and call up High School Me, who never once bothered to toast the frozen-ass regular Eggo waffle I ate on the way to the bus stop almost every morning for years.  This would have been a revelation.

Analog Reading:

Almost finished with John Darnielle's Devil House.  I took it with me on a visit to the eye surgeon the other day, where I was seeing about my cataract (see what I did there?  and also there?).  The only review I had been able to find online for this guy was from an elderly man who was pleased that the doctor was willing to pray with him before undergoing cataract surgery.  I didn't have high hopes, and maybe also that was not the book I should have had sitting in my lap when the doctor walked in.  Oops.  Turns out the doctor is super nice and had a much better explanation for what is going on in my busted ass eyeball and how it can be fixed than the first doctor I saw, so, you know, #blessed.

Syllabus #147

Hello a day late, not from the curiously windowless hotel room in Memphis where I tried to compose and post this missive on my customary Sunday morning.  While our last-minute accommodations lacked views and functioning wifi, it had much to offer in other departments.  For instance, our room boasted convenient proximity to the ice machine, and came with a surprise bonus of lipstick smeared on the toilet lid.  Not to mention the older couple I overheard while I was waiting to check in, giving the front desk an inventory of items stolen from their room.

Never mind that we were supposed to be in New York City this weekend until Delta was like, 'Hey guys, wouldn't it be funny if we canceled your flight but just didn't tell you until like 3 hours before the flight?  April Fool's!  Good joke, right?'  And we were like, 'Nah, dawg, that was last Friday, nice try though.'  

We already had pet-sitting paid for, and I'll take any excuse to let someone else deal with Charlie for a day or two.  Memphis seemed like a good idea, and it wasn't not fun to visit, but I feel like 24 hours was plenty.  I now have but one question for Memphis:  Does anyone live there?  Seriously.  Outside of Beale Street and the Civil Rights Museum, there were like 5 people in the whole city, and one of them was a kid who approached us in two different places, Saturday night and Sunday morning, asking us to "sponsor his football team."  I felt like somehow reading the last page of The Stand in the car on the way to Memphis pulled me into an alternate timeline where the super flu really happened and Andy and I were the only two people alive in all of Shelby County.  

Always timely advice as we move into Abuse of Air Conditioning season.  Let me just say, once and for all, that the point of air conditioning is to prevent you from actively sweating your tits off while you are passively doing nothing.  It is to prevent high levels of humidity from allowing black mold to proliferate inside your home.  It is NOT to artificially create the conditions of another season in which it is appropriate to wear long sleeves and pants.  It is NOT to trigger a flare-up of your wife's Reynaud's Syndrome in the middle of June so you can wear a hoodie while you're watching TV.  It is NOT to force your wife to have to sleep under multiple blankets and a bathrobe while wearing fleece pajamas in July.  And look, it goes both ways!  The purpose of heat is not to allow me to wear shorts and t-shirts in December.  I'll Jimmy Carter the shit out of the cold months before I crank the heat above 68 degrees.    

I love literary food porn.  This is a great roundup of meals in literature, and I'll add a few of my own.  Say what you will about Hemingway but anytime he mentions food or drink I can't help but salivate because he was a man of appetites who could appreciate the hell out of a cold drink on a hot day, or a simple meal of bread and cheese.  Also, if you want to read one long extended gustatory rhapsody peppered with the drama of a complicated gay relationship, Brian Washington's Memorial  is your guy.  

A new David Sedaris essay in The New Yorker.  Imagine a world where David walks around immersed in his iPhone like 99% of us, and courts exactly none of the delightfully weird encounters he shares with us.  Be like David.

Ben Franklin, what a guy.

Analog Reading:

I can finally lay down The Stand.  Thank the sweet merciful lort, or, as my favorite character, Tom Cullen would say, "Ooh lawsy me, M-O-O-N that spells this book was too goddamn long."  I'll say it again, Stephen King needed to get down off his high horse and let somebody edit that sumbitch.  I started the book on February 27th, took breaks and read two other books, and finished it on April 9th!  This book spanned three months of my life.  Forty-two days.  Over 1,300 pages.  I can't say I didn't enjoy it, and I can't say I won't read another Stephen King book, but I'm gonna need a prolonged separation before I'm ready to enter into another long term relaysh with one of his books.

Now I'm finally getting around to John Darnielle's Devil House and so far, so good!  It's a little unfair that someone can be so multi-talented, fronting one of my favorite bands of all time and wielding the pen so deftly, but I'll allow it.

Syllabus #146

Somehow this past week rivaled January in its interminability.  It wasn't just me.  Everyone at work felt it, too.  We all kept blindly groping around for Friday, lamenting a Tuesday we all swore was Wednesday, a Wednesday that almost certainly should have been a Thursday.  Most of the time, I can fake it and look like I have my crap togetherish, despite feeling like I Literally Cannot Even, but when everyone else freely and openly admits they are Unable to Even, it's kind of hard to Give an Adequate Number of Fucks.  It was a week.

Drink

On Saturday morning, I got the Spanish Wordle on the first guess.  The word was doler, the infinitive verb meaning 'to hurt,' so I guess it was that kinda semana for all of us.

Wordle (ES)  #86 1/6

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

https://wordle.danielfrg.com/

What do you do when your kid is reading a book that makes you uncomfortable?  1.  Maybe read the whole book before you pass judgment.  2.  Get over it, not every book is for every person.  

I'd have an easier time digesting these allegations of coke-fueled Republican orgies if Mitch McConnell's neck didn't look like a fleshlight with a head protruding from it.  

I had an extra puff pastry kicking around in the freezer, so I saw this recipe for a skillet vegetable pie as a beacon of weeknight hope.  Indeed, Andy actually LIKED it and asked to have it again someday soon.  That's like finding a 4-leaf clover and as you bend over to pick it you see a $100 bill laying next to it.  I don't know what alignment of stars was responsible for it, but I ain't mad.  

Analog Reading:

Maybe I wouldn't feel like time is marching in place if I could finish The friggin Stand and move on with my life.  It's not that it's not a compelling narrative, but I've spent too much time with it and I'm ready for something else.