Syllabus #161

In times like these, you have to ask yourself:  Are you the cat, or are you the taco?

Losing my sense of smell from My, My, My Corona was terrifying.  It came back gradually starting about a week after it disappeared.  Cool story, I first realized I wasn't able to smell anything 5 days in, as I was sitting on the floor watching Conversations With Friends and applying Bag Balm to my knees, elbows, and feet.  If you know, you know.  It has a strong medicinal odor, and I was getting nothing.  It was devastating to think I might never fully taste food again, or die because I couldn't smell a gas leak or a fire.  Not to mention how I or my house might smell bad because I just wouldn't know!  I guess there would be a silver lining though, as one person in the article mentioned - no more fart smell.  Kids are notorious for letting it rip beside my head when I'm crouched down beside them to help them find a book, and I really wouldn't miss that.

You bet your sweet bippy those are udders

Our long national vending machine nightmare appears to have mostly abated.  Sharks, on the other hand...  Tangentially, if vending machine tip-overs used to be responsible for more annual deaths than shark attacks, why didn't they just devise a system to secure them to the wall or the floor?  If IKEA figured out how not to have dressers and bookshelves topple over onto toddlers, surely we can do the same for vending machines?  And then let's bolt all the sharks to the floor of the ocean for added safety while we're at it.

I, for one, fricking love Pilates.  Much like yoga, I think nearly anyone with a body can do it, to whatever degree they are currently able.  The goal isn't to get better at it, but to feel better doing it, which carries over to the functional movements in your daily life.

There is a theme here.  Aquatic challenges and physical activity.  I tried paddle boarding this summer and, dare I say, I was not terrible at it?  Thanks, Pilates!  Thanks, yoga!  Andy had to eat a pile of Nashville Hot Crow* tendies because he thought I was going to be awful at it, but I stayed up the whole time and he fell in the water twice.  

*Nashville Hot Crow is like eating regular crow except you feel pretty good about it in the moment, but the day after you take back what you said, your rectum becomes an uncapped fire hydrant spewing jet fuel and broken glass.

Speaking of challenges, I accept.  I think the marketing department could have come up with a better name than CinnaFuego Toast Crunch, though.  Like, I could see if it was that churro cereal, yea, drop some fuegos in there.  But why not Cinnamon Roast Crunch or Red Hot Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Nashville Hot Cinnamon Toast Crunch, or even just classic Flamin' Hot CTC?  Guys, you need to consult me on these matters.  I'm out here.  

It's a curious concept for cereal, because most people consume cereal with milk, which will decrease the heat factor.  Does that mean they really take it to Flavor Town, knowing people will most likely be milking it on down a few notches on the Scoville scale?  If you raw dog your cereal, are you in for a world of hurt?

Analog Reading:

Finished The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  A couple reactions:  Wow, the 1950s were a simpler time.  After reading Young Mungo, I was full-body cringing whenever 8-year-old Billy was left alone with any of the other male characters in the book, fully waiting for him to be molested or beaten.  Everything's fine, Billy's fine, he just saw some titties at an X-rated circus, narrowly missed seeing a dead body, and was almost thrown from a train by a deranged religious con-man, no bigs though.  After all that saccharine stuff, though, man, the ending was a little tough to swallow.  Also, 98% of the plot of this book would be shot to hell if the characters had cell phones.  

Noir by Christopher Moore.  From the title alone, it's obviously going to be very on-the-nose to the point of genre parody.  The prose is amusing but it takes some getting used to.  It's a lot of slang and period/sub-culture specific dialog that reminds me of the scene in an episode of Gilmore Girls when Lorelai goes behind the counter at Luke's and starts calling out orders to the kitchen in 1950s diner slang:  "Adam and Eve on a raft and wreck 'em! That's real live diner talk, see? The wreck 'em is the scrambled part."

Can You Ever Forgive Me by Lee Israel.  The best I can say is that it was mercifully short.  If it had been any longer I might have bailed after the first 20 pages or so.  It was 130 pages of, "Yes I did this kind of bad thing that was technically illegal but I can explain!  And also I was good at it!"

Started reading Ottessa Moshfegh's new novel, Lapvona.  Maureen Corrigan's review of it on Fresh Air was not super positive, as she was just kind of grossed out by the whole book and didn't really see the point of it.  I kind of felt like she was daring me to read it, so here we are.  Set in what seems to be the Middle Ages, it is evoking a lot of filth and brutality, but it's not a terrible read so far.  Will report back.

Syllabus #160

Thus begins my last week of summer vacaysh from my Real Job.  It started off with a literal bang, when an inattentive driver plowed into me and totaled my poor old Honda.  RIP old girl.  You had a good 14 years criss-crossing the continent and wearing plates from 5 different states.  Hot Girl Summer got even hotter and moister when I contracted an ill-timed case of Corona Extra (I would have preferred Tecate but nobody bothered to ask, it's fine, whatever) that wiped out most of our vacation plans.  It's been a wild ride.  Or more like wild walk, because that's pretty much all I did besides work, and I have excellent tan lines to show for it.  From shoulders down to butt cheeks, it's a blinding 17 shades whiter than my arms and legs.  

 

Weed is in the air...every time I sniff around...  I've joked before that kids who grow up in East Nashville are going to think all the flowering trees smell like weed, and they'll get to college (this imaginary kid is also very sheltered somehow despite the nightly gunshots, etc.) and smell weed on their hall and remark, "Ahh, why does it smell dogwoods in bloom indoors in September?"  It's like as soon as winter ends and the weather turns halfway decent, everyone in the land carries their bongs out to the front porch to get baked en plein air.  I don't even need a weed guy in springtime, I just go for a walk and snag a contact high for free.

Maybe I should aim higher, but getting at least one entry published in the annual You Are So Nashville If contest feels like some kind of accomplishment, even if I'm really just chasing the dragon of my winning entry in 2019.

This article is oooooold, but it holds up.  The Oregon Trail Generation is a great descriptor for people who feel like they aren't old enough to be Gen Z but are a little too old school to resonate with most Millennials.  I didn't have the sosh meeds until after high school, we didn't have a computer in the house until 6th grade, and I most definitely dined out on those AOL free trial CDs so I could get up in those creepy chat rooms.  My proudest use of AOL chat rooms was in doing research for a group project in 7th or 8th grade where we had to research a given city and make a proposal to host the Olympics there - we were assigned Dublin and I was the only functioning human in my group of wastoids so I did ALL the work, including the research on public infrastructure.  I popped in an Irish chat room and asked what the sewage and plumbing sitch was like over there, and some very helpful chap said he didn't know much about the pipes but he could assume they were robust because "the Irish lay massive bricks."   

Heat waves been faking me out.  It's wild that our regular-Tuesday-in-Nashville weather caused such havoc in Europe.  I get it, they don't have infrastructure designed to withstand these temperatures, anymore than we are equipped to deal with prolonged bouts of below-freezing temps.  Two winters ago, during the same cold snap when the electrical grid in Texas went to hell, a pipe burst in the abandoned house next door to us and there was a frozen waterfall cascading down the outside of the house from the upstairs bathroom.  

Analog Reading:

Memphis by Tara Stringfellow was fantastic.  I breezed right through it in about a day and a half, which sort of makes me feel bad for the author, like when you spend two whole days making Thanksgiving dinner and then everybody fills up on cheese and crackers and booze before the meal, eats a fraction of what you anticipated, and leaves you to do the dishes 30 minutes after you carve the bird.  That said, I can guarantee I enjoyed this book way more than most people enjoy their annual plate heaped with various piles of beige slop and overrated, dry poultry.  It was also a neat coincidence that the three generations of women in the family almost exactly mirrored my own in terms of our ages and birth years.

The rest of this week I've been rambling along The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles.  The prose is fluid and the adventures (and comedy of errors) never cease.  At over 500 pages there sure better be plenty of movement, and unlike Stephen King's gratuitously unedited The Stand, there's no discernible fluff!  The story is a bit saccharine, though.  It reads like a PG-13 Larry McMurtry novel.  It's reminiscent of The Last Picture Show without all the banging of the coach's wife and the best friend's girlfriend's mom.  Nevertheless, it's a very sweet story that actually makes me smile while I'm reading it (truly, I'm as shocked as you are), which is kind of a welcome break after the extreme violence of Young Mungo and the heartbreak of Memphis.

Syllabus #159

Hi hello how are you?  How would you rate your Sunday scaries on a scale of 1-10?  On a scale of "what day even is it?" to "I'd rather pop out my eyeballs and with a melon baller and feed them to a stray cat so I don't have to look at my inbox tomorrow"?  I'm at about a 3/"not setting an alarm yet but will almost certainly be awake before 6:00 am."

I like to think I'm not shallow or obsessed with youth culture, but.  BUT.  Yesterday an old man mistook me for the daughter of someone who couldn't be older than 45, and I was weirdly thrilled.  Let's ignore the fact that the man was either senile or had impaired vision, because the woman in question was also much taller than me with light hair and blue eyes, yet he said we looked alike.  Just let me have this one thing.

In case you've forgotten that we live in a hot tub full of jet fuel, just waiting for a stray ember from your redneck neighbor's random Tuesday night fireworks to blow us all to hell, here's a little reminder.  

I didn't have the time or energy to engage with any other news this week, apparently.

Analog Reading:

Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo was all of those adjectives you read on a dust jacket - transporting, gutting, brutally sad, tragically beautiful...you get it.  It was an excellent book and I couldn't put it down, but not in a staring at a car crash kind of way.  I just felt so invested in Mungo's journey, and despite the horrific violence that played out in the latter third of the book, it managed to end with the possibility of happiness?  

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris was, as ever, a treat.  He's a little more self-reflective and inwardly focused in this one, in contrast to the cutting and hilarious observations he's known for making about people he encounters out in the world.  That's in there, too, but I was surprised by the amount of introspection.  Despite some of the heavier subject matter, I still cackled out loud finishing the last essay with a beer on the front porch.  

Just started Memphis by Tara Stringfellow.  I feel like I might need to borrow some adjectives from Mungo before we're through - but don't the best books kick you in the teeth and teach you something about empathy?

Syllabus #158

I'm very good at Wordle

 

I write to you as a free woman.  Yesterday, I finally tested negative twice, in the morning and afternoon, after 12 miserable days in covid isolation.  

I fully realize what an ignorant child I have been for complaining so much, but damn it was awful.  The symptoms were not the problem - I had a fever, headache, and general body aches for less than 24 hours, after which it felt like a very average cold that wouldn't have even kept me home from work back in Precedented Times.  I did completely lose my sense of smell for a few days, and it is still around maybe 30% for most odors.  My ability to taste was severely muted for a few days, but that wasn't really as disturbing as losing my sense of smell.  I think I might generally be a non-taster, but this past week I could have gargled Tabasco without breaking a sweat (as opposed to doing it like a champ but maybe wanting some milkies afterwards).  

The worst part was the isolation.  Yes, we are fortunate to have enough space that I could stay away from Andy and not infect him.  But being enclosed in one room for 9 days, save for solitary walks outside, and eating every meal on the floor, was really dehumanizing.  Yea, I read a lot of books and watched a couple good shows I wouldn't have otherwise ever bothered to watch (for free.99, thanks Hulu trial), but I can see how people might quickly go insane in a solitary confinement situation.

When I finally emerged and got to sit at a table, I felt like Borat:

You better believe now I'm in full on Rumspringa mode with my temporary immunity.  Licking subway poles.  Going to raves.  Going to Broadway.  All of it.

Watching:

I tried watching a couple episodes of Hulu's Mormon No More and the people in it were just too normal.  I was vibing with their story, but it was just like, wow you are relatable humans who are having a real human experience and I'm glad you're sharing your story with people who might need to hear it, but I came here for salaciousness and scandal and you just aren't delivering.

I then treated myself to an episode of Conversations with Friends at each of my solitary floor meals.  There are a lot of boobies in this show.  It does feel quite faithful to the novel, and Ireland looks lovely.  I'm salivating over their public transit, but also feeling sorry for the fact that part of the story takes place in the summer and everyone in Dublin is wearing pants and jackets.  You mean it can be summer in a place and you don't get slapped with a wet towel when you step outside, and not everyone walks around with a permanent sweatstache from late May until mid-October?

Analog Reading:

I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys.  I started it at night and read the rest the following day.  Her books are fast reads, mostly because she straddles the line between YA and adult fiction, and so they aren't overly complex.  She just tells a really good, compelling story.  This book was set at the tail end of the Romanian dictatorship that fell in a spectacular, violent uprising at Christmas, 1989, when the Ceaușescus were executed by firing squad after a 2 hour trial.  I enjoyed the bit of character crossover from her previous novel, Fountains of Silence, set in 1950s Madrid under Franco.  The diplomat's son who befriends the main character in that book is now a diplomat himself, and his son befriends the main character in this book.  Neat/time is a flat circle/etc.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman - I can't shake the feeling that I've read this book before.  I have almost certainly read this book before.   But, I have no idea how long ago, it's entertaining, and it's getting to be slim pickins up in here, so I did finish it before I taking my Kindle out of airplane mode to sync the couple of new library books I just downloaded.

Partway through Douglas Stuart's new novel, Young Mungo.  I loved and was heartbroken by Shuggie Bain, and this one is just as beautifully sad.  The Glaswegian dialect takes a bit of getting used to, but the book just wouldn't be the same without it.  It's funny, I almost forgot the characters were actually meant to be speaking English, and there's a scene where Mungo is helping his sister study for French class and he's struggling with the idea that something like a spoon can have a gender in another language, and I thought "yea, that's funny, I feel that way about speaking English and learning Spanish" and then I remembered, oh, this bloke actually is speaking some very particular type of English.

Still reading Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris.  I like to dole out his books in small morsels, like I'm some kind of rat waiting on a pellet to drop in my Skinner box.  Which is an apt description of my life in covid isolation.  It was an exercise in restraint not to engulf an entire book in one sitting.

Syllabus #157

Hello from the alleys of East Nashville, where I've been lurking like the piece of human garbage I am.   

the only cat I can get near right now because cats can suffer from covid

Seriously.  After 2.5 years of thinking I was something special, an immunological unicorn, I'm finally forced to take a big ol' bite of this rancid panini sammich.  Which I can't even taste because, what do you know, I've lost my ability to smell or taste pretty much anything.  Fart right next to me, go ahead.  Dutch oven me if you dare.  

The alleys have more shade and less people, so sometimes when I have to get out of the house righthtisverysecondorIwillscream I walk in the alleys.  Also I can't tell anymore that they smell like trash juice, so, as Martha Stewart would say, it's a good thing.

Honestly it's been refreshing to have something new to bitch about other than my car.  

I kid, I kid.  Because I've been doing both.  In fact, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone this past week trying to get the claims adjuster to pick up, but apparently he just went AWOL after he decided my car was totaled and had it towed to a salvage yard without my knowledge or permission.  

It's been fun!  I'm supposed to be on vacation right now but instead I've been in my bedroom since Tuesday afternoon, praying for it to rain so the asshats setting off fireworks in broad daylight in a drought wouldn't burn down this entire zip code.  It's raining as I type, so at least there's that.

Watching:  Watching?  What is this totally uncharacteristic thing I've been doing?  Normally, if I watch an hour of TV a week, that's a lot.  But my weak, pitiful covid brain can only handle so much at the moment.  During times when I'm just zoning out a little, or eating one of my sad, hastily prepared meals on the floor in my sealed-off bedroom, I've been watching Abbott Elementary and it is as SNACK.  It's like The Office meets It's Always Sunny, toned down for network TV and set in a South Philly elementary school.  I know, I know, I slept on this show when it came out, what, a year ago?  But also, we only have HBO and Netflix, and this is a Hulu show.  I decided to treat myself to a monthlong free trial (please remind me to cancel on July 28th) so I can watch Abbott and Fire Island.

And watch Fire Island I did.  I capped off Pride month by laying in bed with my laptop, sequestered in my bedroom, and watched Fire Island.  If Abbott is a snack, Fire Island is a whole ice cream sundae, dripping with hot fudge, smothered in whipped cream, topped with a cherry, and, duh, garnished with a load of wet nuts.  

I also started watching the Hulu adaptations of Sally Rooney's Normal People and Conversations with Friends.  I really like Jemima Kirke so I think I'll stick with Conversations.  There is something about the portrayal of the Marianne character in Normal People that is making me uncomfortable.  Maybe because she is exactly as socially awkward and abrupt as I am afraid I come across to people?

Analog Reading:

Finished Chuck Klosterman's The Nineties.  Ah, it was a simpler time.

Tom Perrotta's new Tracy Flick Can't Win.  If I had read this under more clear-headed circumstances, I might have a few critical opinions of the book, but as it stands, I friggin loved it.  The ending really, as they say, escalated quickly, and I did shed one lone tear over Tracy's final chapter.

Read Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.  It was beautiful and had what I'll call a tasteful amount of science fiction.  I don't go in for too much space shit, where the technology and the physics of it all take center stage.  If I'm going to touch anything that can be classified in that genre, it's got to have human protagonists, it has to focus on the emotional or societal ramifications of the situation, and it can't dwell too much on world building and describing technology.  Tell me a story, don't give me a Dell warranty.  And this followed my instructions flawlessly.  A wonderful, moving, human tale about time travel, pandemics, and the possibility that we live in a simulation.

Nearly finished Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free by Sara Weinman.  I kind of hate it?  But I've come so far waiting for it to get interesting that I'll probably finish it.  Nobody is truly sympathetic in the book, and it's too procedural for my taste.  But I'm a glutton for that sunk cost fallacy, so here we are.

Started the latest from David Sedaris, Happy-Go-Lucky.  What is there to say?  Of course it's excellent.  It's not as shockingly funny as some of his other essay collections, and it deals with some heavier themes, but his observational acuity and verbal deft are always a treat.