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.