Syllabus #152

Pardon my absence last weekend, and my tardiness today.  I hope you invoked the 15-minute rule and bounced when you realized I was a no-show.  

I only ever had one opportunity to ditch class because the instructor was more than 15 minutes late.  Freshman year at UArts, our spring semester 3-D design teacher was kind of a mess.  He was a disorganized schlub but he meant well.  One day we all got to the studio and he was nowhere to be found, so we waited out the clock and at the stroke of 9:15 we all walked out, and as we filed down the hall to the elevator, the doors parted and out stepped the instructor, his arms laden with hot fresh boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts for all of us.  Nobody went back to class.  I still feel like an asshole for that.

We went to Chattanooga last weekend.  I'm a fan.  It's like Nashville's much more chill younger sibling.  Lots of outposts of Nashville-based restaurants, breweries, and coffee shops without the aggressive Woo culture and in-your-face bro-country jingoism.  

What else? It's been a busy time.  School's almost out for the summer (school).  I'm a glutton for punishment and will have two summer jobs again, but with less responsibility and fewer hours than the regular school year, andplusalso I like money, so it's cool, I guess?

 

Did you hear the one about Dolly Parton starring in a Taco Bell musical about Mexican Pizza?  I have questions.  

If a fart falls in an office, and nobody smells it, was it ever really a fart?

This cultural deep dive into the mullet posits that, these days, you'd be hard pressed to fashion a haircut that would cause someone to cross the street to get away from you.  I disagree.  If I shaved a stripe down the middle of my head and then braided my remaining hair into Pippi Longstocking braids on either side so I looked like a demented human Cynthia doll, I feel like the nice white moms pushing toddlers in their expensive jogging strollers would probably elect to give me wide berth.  

Analog Reading:

Finished Lost in the Valley of Death by Harley Rustad.  It was kind of underwhelming.  It wasn't as compelling as, say, Krakauer's Into the Wild, and the missing person at the center of it seemed like kind of a chode, honestly.

Read The End of October by Lawrence Wright.  Hoo boy.  I guess this book was considered remarkable and prescient when it was published in April 2020, because of how meticulously detailed and eerily similar the pandemic plot mirrored covid, given that it was obviously written many months, if not years, before our current pandemic began.  It finally felt safe enough to read it now, and honestly I'm glad I didn't read it, (or Station Eleven or The Stand) any earlier than I did.  It was quite a thrill ride and the pacing was brisk.  If I had read a book like this prior to 2020, it would have seemed completely implausible and I would have considered the plot to have gone off the rails at about 30 pages in, but as things stand, I kept reading and nodding and thinking, "Yea, that checks out."  How times change.  

Up next, I'm going to crack open The Matchmaker:  A Spy in Berlin by Paul Vidich.  Lately, I've been trying out some genres I don't normally dig on, like thrillers and spy novels, and it's been fun to change it up. We'll see how this one goes.

Syllabus #151

Wow, so, slow news week, amirite?

If only.  

It's Mother's Day, which makes this week's Supreme Court draft opinion leak all the more poignant.  Motherhood should be a choice.  Period.  Women deserve no less than full bodily autonomy to make choices about what goes into our bodies, what comes out of them, and what we put on them.  Case in point:  The woman in the picture below chose to be a mom, and an awesome one at that.  The baby you see here did not.  But she should be able to choose to wear those overalls without a shirt if that's what she's into.  Her body, her choice.

Summer, 1986

Ugh.  

Double ugh.

On Ben Franklin's abortion recipe:  "In this week’s leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” Yet abortion was so “deeply rooted” in colonial America that one of our nation’s most influential architects went out of his way to insert it into the most widely and enduringly read and reprinted math textbook of the colonial Americas—and he received so little pushback or outcry for the inclusion that historians have barely noticed it is there. Abortion was simply a part of life, as much as reading, writing, and arithmetic."  I guess Florida won't be including that math book in their curriculum either?

Who gets abortions?  Short answer, just about any type of person with a functioning uterus you can think of.  For every reason you can think of, and some you probably would prefer not to imagine, like a child getting raped by a family member, or a woman finding out late in a pregnancy that terminating is the only way to save her own life.  What do all the reasons have in common, though?  They are none. of. anyone. else's. damn. business.

In lighter news:

You can exhale now.  I know you were waiting with bated breath to find out if our boy Malcolm would ever have his new penis moved from his arm to his crotch.  Surely I can't be the only person whose recent YouTube for Roku search history includes the phrase 'british man arm penis,' can I? 

I can't even tell you how amped I am for this Weird Al mockumentary starring Daniel Radcliffe.  Will I actually watch it when it comes out in September?  Probably not!  Will I think about it from time to time and delight in the fact of its existence?  Absolutely.  

I made this tomato butter pasta because someone sent Andy the recipe and he was weirdly excited about it?  And it was just okay.  It was not worth the amount of time or butter required for its execution, but it was actually better as leftovers (probably because I didn't have to do any of the work). 

Analog Reading:

Read Other People's Clothes by Calla Henkel.  The description I read that prompted me to place a hold for the ebook sounded both fascinating and potentially vapid.  Thankfully it was much more the former, and, I suspect, only deliberately and self-consciously the latter, in strategic places.  It was excellent.

Now reading Lost in the Valley of Death: A tale of obsession and danger in the Himalayas by Harley Rustad.  It's a non-fiction investigation into the disappearance of a 36-year old American adventure dude who disappeared while on a spiritual quest in the Himalayas.  Interesting so far, but I gotta say that I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the missing guy (yet).

Syllabus #150

This past week was Book Fair Week.  If over two years of a global pandemic produced anything positive, it was to spare me from holding 4 consecutive book fairs.  Fortunately for the world, but not so much for me, life has army crawled its way back to the edge of normalcy.  

A perennial problem

This spring, I had no choice but to pretend to be excited about having a real book fair again.  I had to touch money.  I had to explain that 1 quarter + 1 nickel + 1 penny does not equal "3 monies," but rather, $.31 cents, which can buy exactly nothing.  I had explain the what and why of sales tax over and over and over again.  I had to make kids cry.

It's over.  In a few more days, I'll stop having night terrors about hypothetically handling a financial document improperly and inadvertently owing the school hundreds of dollars.  In a few weeks, I'll stop clenching my jaw at the sound of assorted coins being dumped from a plastic baggie onto a hard surface.  I'll never erase from my brain the image of a child's eyes welling up with tears when I tell them all the rhinestone diaries and all the unicorn diaries are sold out and can't be restocked.

Learning what a hellacious shit parade the book fair is for the adults running it has been one of the most crushing realizations of adulthood.  Book fair blows.  I said what I said.  

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You know what, I didn't have time to read anything compelling on the internet this week.  I was too busy breathing into a paper bag when I got home every night.  And I was reading a really good book when I wasn't hyperventilating.  Y'all can deal.  Better luck next week!

Analog Reading:

Just finished The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley.  Boy howdy was that a journey.  It felt a little schlocky in the beginning, and it never exactly blossomed into literature, but it was entertaining as hell.  I could not put it down towards the end, and I was probably gripping my Kindle hard enough to leave finger indentations in the cover.  

Up next:  Other People's Clothes by Calla Henkel