Syllabus #185

I have not read one single thing of interest on the internet this week.  I have been too busy using my screen time to cling, tooth and nail, to a spot in the top ten of this BS Diamond League challenge in Duolingo.  I should be fluent in Spanish by now, but all I can really tell you is that the cow didn't upload those photos because it doesn't have fingers.  La vaca no subio esas fotos porque no tiene dedos.  

I'm sure you'll need that one in your back pocket (la bolsilla de atras) on your next trip abroad (viaje al extranjero).  De nada.

Lola was itchin' for a fight, but Hadley just wanted to lick her head and make biscuits on her tummy

Analog Reading:

Rabbit Redux by John Updike was a lot darker and just chock full of racism and misogyny than I remembered, even more so than Rabbit Run in many ways.  I mean, it was of a time, and it's not like Updike was glorifying the characters' behavior and attitudes, but it was a little cringe, as the Youngs have said.  I'm still gonna read the other two books, but I'm taking a little break to work through the rest of the books on my Kindle before I take it out of airplane mode to download Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.

The World Record Book of Racist Stories by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar, was, coincidentally, also a lot darker and chock full of racism and misogyny than its predecessor!  I recently read You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey:  Crazy stories about racism, and it was appalling but somehow not quite as heavy.  The stories in this one were drawn not just from Amber and Lacey but also from their parents and older siblings, and man, have they seen some shit.  

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta will probably have a lot of sex and maybe some misogyny but I'm hoping no (or at least much much less) racism!  But still a lot of ignorant, entitled white people acting like the sun rotates around them and the earth is just there to cushion their lily white feet.

Syllabus #184

 Wooooooooooooooow.  This week really got away from me.  I spent half the week in a K-hole* blowing my nose on the couch, alternating between reading John Updike novels and watching White Lotus.  I took three negative covid tests, so I guess I just had a good old fashioned debilitating cold that turned my sinuses into an inner-city fire hydrant wrenched open on a hot July day, kept me up all night coughing even after chugging** some Vicks 44, and gave me a 3-day headache.  Everyone likes hearing hyperbolized accounts of other people's moderately inconvenient communicable diseases, right?

*I've never done ketamine, I just wanted to sound cool

**taking the exact 30mL dosage as directed on the bottle

Thank you to my incredible care team, impeccable bedside manner

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I didn't read a single thing on the internet this week that would be worth sharing.  What I did do with my screen time was a concerning amount of Duolingo, because I'm in some kind of 3-week Diamond league challenge where you have to stay in the top 10 or you get knocked out.  I have been clawing my way to the top 3, neck and neck with some guy from Israel whose Duolingo handle is 'Your Real Daddy.'  I must best him.

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Analog Reading:

Finished Stella Maris.  It left a lot of questions open, especially in contrast to the narrative presented in The Passenger, but they'd all be spoilers so I won't raise them here.

Andy is on a John Updike kick, reading the Rabbit tetralogy.  I read them probably 15 years ago, and have forgotten most of the plot, so I decided to revisit them.  They hit different when you're approaching middle age and have lived through the Me Too era, among other things.  Harry Angstrom just oozes misogyny from his pores, and he's a racist prick, but Updike just writes such a beautiful sentence that it carries you along.  It's a little bit of Stockholm syndrome at work, but I'm not not enjoying the books.  

I read Rabbit, Run over the course of about 3 days and am now plowing through Rabbit Redux.  In the 2nd book, he's 36 but is basically already a paunchy old man, which is almost as offensive to me as the racism and misogyny.

syllabus #183

Shout out to the unhoused woman asking for money at the intersection of Spring and Main Streets yesterday.  When life hands you a shit sandwich and you still have a sense of humor, I respect that.  She had a cardboard sign that said on one side "My boyfriend broke up with me."  The reverse said, "But he said we could still be cousins."

Juicy Seafood.  As advertised.

 Saturday night we tried a new-to-us restaurant, Juicy Seafood.  If you haven't been dining in a manner that combines the vibes of "taking a goldfish home from the county fair" and "medieval torture practice," you haven't been living right.  Basically, you pick out your desired protein from an array of shellfish, crustaceans, or sausage, and they bring it to you in a knotted plastic bag filled with boiling hot oil and Cajun spices, potatoes, and corn on the cob.  You tie on a plastic bib and, if you're dainty (I am dainty), you put on plastic gloves, and go to town.  

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This Idaho murder case is wild on so many levels, and this forensic genealogy business is one reason I will never submit my DNA to an ancestry website.  I would rather not be implicated when some derelict I am distantly or not-so-distantly related to does something heinous.  It's bad enough to read about it on the news, don't link me to that mess in some FBI database.

Where is home?  That's a hard question for a lot of reasons, not least among them the fact that I have moved perhaps 13 times since college ended 16 years ago?  I have more to say on the topic but it would require a full-length essay.

Andy and I were just talking about how I take too many pictures of the cats, but I feel validated by this article.  'Tis better to photograph than to give in to the apparent impulse to squeeze or eat which photography is, mercifully, replacing.  

"A prevailing theory is that the brain tries to counteract positive emotion with negative impulse. This feeling of frustration may go some way to describing why every time I experience a wave of love for my cat, I reach for my phone. Short of absorbing her entirely, the only response left to me is to relentlessly capture her image."

Leave it to the Finns and their superior, fantasy-land education system to gracefully and thoroughly do the thing that we all, but especially librarians, should be doing in this country.  That is to say, educating everyone, young and old, to spot online misinformation.

"Ms. Uusitalo said her goal was to teach students methods they could use to distinguish between truth and fiction. “I can’t make them think just like me,” she said. “I just have to give them the tools to make up their own opinions.”"

Speaking of Why Education Is Important - this B dropped of 9th grade to get married and look at her now!  This story has it all!  Adult bullying!  Faking a death!  Online impersonation!  

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Analog Reading:

Finally finished Rachel Kushner's essay collection, The Hard Crowd.  Like I said before, the cultural criticism essays didn't all resonate with me, but the autobiographical ones were rather interesting.  

Also finished Aubrey Gordon's What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat.  It was illuminating.  Acknowledging my thin-person privilege, I never really considered how difficult it is to navigate certain parts of daily existence when you live in a very large body.

Now reading Cormac McCarthy's other new novel, Stella Maris, the follow-up to The Passenger.  It is told entirely via transcripts of the sister's therapy sessions at the mental hospital.  There's a little too much inside-baseball discussion of mathematical theories and quantum physics, but this format is preferable to the passages in The Passenger that took place during her hallucinations.  It's at least more coherent.  It also reminds of the time when the Robin Williams joint, Patch Adams, came out, and I was so sure that voluntarily committing yourself to a mental institution would be a Very Fun Thing To Do upon reaching adulthood.  What the what?  I mean, ahhhhviously, mental illness is not some kind of game, but it just seemed so charming in the movie!

In closing and unrelated to anything, this ad was promoted to me on Facebook, which makes me both terrified and proud.  Terrified because I haven't really given the FB algorithm much to work with in the past several years yet it knows me SO well.  Proud because clearly I've managed to establish what a friggin' weirdo I am:

Syllabus #182

We went to a meditation center this morning.  The meditation part was aight.  I had never really made an effort to meditate before, because it's hard for me to sit still, and I consider yoga to be a reasonable but movement-based analogue.  But I gave it a whirl.  It was nice.  Maybe I'll go back.  

After the guided meditation part, though, the guy leading the experience gave a talk about impermanence.  I was really vibing with his message about not waiting for everything in life to be perfect before you can start enjoying what you have or being happy.  But.  Of course there's a but.  This woman sitting across from me could not sit still and it was stressing. me. out.  I eventually had to just look at the floor instead of sitting upright and letting my gaze fall naturally in front of me, because all I could see was this lady who should maybe, ah, meditate a little more, or take some ludes, or something, man.  She was like, running her hands through her hair, and then rubbing her temples, wringing her hands, kneading her thighs, stroking her arms, god, why do I know all this and why is it still eating at me hours later?  Maybe she was autistic and that was all stimming?  Maybe she was supes hungo and it was all she could do not to barf into her mask (in which case honey, I have been there, although I barfed into an N95 because of food poisoning, not a hangover)?  I dunno her life.  All I know is I need to let it go.  It's a me problem, but boy was it jarring to witness.

If you're in Nashville, highly recommend Zoolumination!

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Sssimply fascinating.  Mom, don't click on that, it's an article about snake genitals.

Truthfully, I have't read the full text of this article yet, but I want to applaud this pull-quote: ..."I am always wary of what people may deem “too much” for younger readers because I think they actually have a pretty good barometer of what they can handle and will happily set a book aside when it starts to go places they don’t want to go."   Yes!  OR - it goes right over their little heads and they don't think about it at all!

The Netflix true crime docudrama about the Moscow, Idaho murders is writing itself.  Also, tell me people haven't looked at this MF's face every day since puberty and said, "Well that boy is going to absolutely dismember someone someday."  That bone structure is destined for psychopathy.

Analog Reading:

At the close of 2022, I finished The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan.  And by close, I mean, it was 2023 on the East Coast and still 2022 on the West Coast.  I fell asleep at 11:30 Central Time with about 30 pages left in the book, and then when WWIII erupted at midnight in East Nashville, I woke up and finished the remaining pages before going back to sleep.  This book has it all.  The pressures and societal expectations for childrearing that fall unfairly on mothers, sexism, racism, surveillance culture and authoritarianism.  A real romp.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan was my first book of 2023.  I am tempted to sit right down and read it again.  It was that good and that rich, and had so many interwoven threads that it's hard to summarize.  A rich tapestry, if you will allow the tired phrase.  Rereading its predecessor set in the same universe, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and then rereading Candy House would be an even better plan.  Maybe I'll close out the year with exactly that.  Note to self.

Currently alternating essays in Rachel Kushner's compilation, The Hard Crowd with chapters from Aubrey Gordon's What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat.  I loved Kushner's novel, The Mars Room, and this essay collection is a mix of personal essays and cultural criticism.  I'm more into the personal essays than the criticism, but whatever, it's fine.  And I'm a huge fan of Aubrey Gordon's podcast with Michael Hobbes, Maintenance Phase, so I am very much reading the book with Aubrey's distinct, enunciated cadence in my ear.  That's not a bad thing, though.  In fact, and this is a real tangent, I realized how much I appreciate her enunciated, articulated speaking style the other day when Andy put on Mazzy Star while we were driving to Home Depot for a piece of wood to cover up the edge of carpet Lenny shredded.  Her* mumbling-ass, weird, fucked up way of singing infuriated me to such a degree that I couldn't even concentrate to park the car until I turned that shit off.  

*Ok, full disclosure, I thought Mazzy Star was an individual person until just this moment when a google informed me that it was the name of the group, but sweet tap-dancing christ, would it have killed that chick to use some hard consonants every once in a while?

New Year, New Date On Our Checks

Just kidding, who uses checks?  I write maybe 3 checks a year and every time I do, I'm filled with rage that I can't just use a card or Venmo them.  It's really a me problem, though.  I can still feel my bowels releasing when I think about the time someone stole my outgoing mail that contained a Christmas card with a check for the trash collector guys AND also accidentally a blank check because I have no motor control or attention to detail and tore off two checks instead of one.  That was a fun series of phone calls to the police and the bank.  Oh I think about it and just laugh and laugh.

Speaking of remembering the good times, I fell down a memory well on New Year's Eve, like the Baby Jessica of Reminiscing.  I dragged out some old photo albums from high school, from the glory days of disposable cameras, and found some real gems.  

Party like it's literally 1999

On the eve of Y2K, my mom wouldn't let me go to the christian youth cult party that my friends were attending at the Grange down the street because she thought there'd be drinking and drugs and also the world was going to end in a fiery blaze of 1s and 0s (in which case, what harm could a little malt liquor and ecstasy do?).  Meanwhile, she went out for the night, so it was just me and Iowa sitting at home to get our Dick Clark on.  She took pity on me and cooked a fancy lobster dinner and took this photo of me in my homecoming dress with Millennium Snoopy, which begs the question if I am 14 years old and THIS sheltered AND was recently subjected to the DARE program, what nefarious things could I have possibly gotten into?  I would have eaten 37 cupcakes and hoovered a full liter of Mountain Dew, then come home and played Minesweeper until 6 am, that's what.  

So the Y2K New Year came and went without incident, just as 2022 rolled over to the year 2023.  I fell asleep reading in bed at 11:30 and woke up at midnight to the thunderous overture of fireworks AND gunshots, which is kind of the East Nashville equivalent of having your cake and eating it too, or seeing Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny in the mall at the same time.  Or perhaps a better analogy is seeing Chris and Liam Hemsworth in the same place, because from a distance, they are pretty hard to tell apart, but when you can compare them side by side, they are obviously very different.  Except I don't have to check my car for holes from stray bullets falling out of the sky when the Hemsworth brothers stand next to each other.  

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Many bloggers post recaps of the past year, and set resolutions/goals/intentions/mantras for the year ahead.  I'm not here to do any of that, because it usually bites me in the ass.  However, I do want to share just one thing that I'm proud of.

Behold my only accomplishment of 2022*:  I read 61 books.  For real, though, I read the unabridged version of Stephen King's The Stand, and that mess should have counted for at least 4 books. I read about 8 books when I was locked away in a tower to contain my never-ending plague, and honestly, my only regret about finally falling victim was that it happened in the summer and not in January.  Give me about a week back at work once the kids return, and if I don't actually get sick, I'll probably start thinking a little trip to the ol' infirmary doesn't sound so bad.**

Here's my annual book count since I started keeping score, for all zero of you who are interested:

2019: 60

2020: 63

2021: 65

2022: 61

2023: ???

* I guess before my mom chimes in in the comments, I did accomplish other things.  I got the Wordle in ONE once, I had an essay about shoplifting published in a humor newsletter, and I was voted Teacher of the Year at work.

**Kinda makes you curious about the aforementioned accomplishment, doesn't it?  Yea, me too, pal.