Syllabus #232

It's not such a bad little tree

We took a little Christmas hiatus last Sunday, and now we're back and ready to wrap up the year of our lawd two thousand and twenty three.  Let the record show that Andy and I had a delightful holiday with both our families combined, and unless anyone is being real passive aggressive about it, nobody got angry, or injured, or ill this year!  Which is great, because last year involved some torn ligaments (not mine) and the year before that involved projectile vomiting into an N-95 mask (mine) and trying to negotiate the purchase of an anti-emetic from a Portuguese pharmacy.

I don't have Spotify so I can't share with you my Spotify Wrapped.  If I did have one, it would probably just be Spotify sending the authorities to my door to make sure I'm not planning on showing up at Laura Jane Grace's house and peeling off her face and making it my face.  Or it might be a gentle suggestion from Spotify that other music exists besides the 20+ year oeuvre of Against Me!.  Sorry, I like what I like.  I don't see people out there giving Swifties a hard time, and they're paying thousands of dollars for concert tickets and weeping in movie theaters.  Let me be.  

Also, 98% of my listening is devoted to podcasts, so it's not that weird.  Get off my back.  I don't have a problem, you have a problem.  I'm not defensive, you're defensive.  I know you are but what am I?  I'm rubber, and you're glue.  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but when it came time to throw bricks through that Starbucks window, you left me all alone (all alone).  

What I do have to report on this, the final day of December, is that I am ending the year with a 250 day Wordle streak!  It's still going strong!  I'm on a Duolingo streak of 1753 days, and a yoga streak of, let's do the math here...2,191 days.  That's 6 years, one of which was a leap year.  I read 65 books (kind of...the 65th one is in progress but I'll have it mostly finished before midnight tonight).  So basically, I accomplished absolutely nothing of consequence and I'm ok with that.

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Now here's an extracurricular I'd gladly chaperone.

 

If this is a true story it's amazing and I want to be friends with the author.

It's not often that I yearn to be incarcerated, but if I was going to go to jail, send me to this one in Chile.

Jeet yet?  What will we all be eating in 2024?

Analog Reading:

Finished Rabbit Remembered by John Updike.  I read the original tetralogy earlier this year, so it was fun to revisit one of my favorite dysfunctional fictional families.

Read Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann.  What a twisted, unbelievably dark time.   The extent of the deception and cold-blooded destruction of the Osage people purely out of greed is just beyond.

Reading Lauren Groff's Vaster Wilds.  As of this morning, I'm about 1/3 of the way into it, and expect to read most of it today.  It's good!  Hoo boy, there's a lot of diarrhea though.  

Post-Festivus

 I forgot to declare a brief hiatus to these syllabi, so I'm doing it now.  I'm just out here trying to be an adult and finely calibrate my alcohol consumption this holiday, in the hopes that I might land at an agreeable midpoint between Sober, Joyless, and Judgmental and Shit-faced Shrieking Banshee.  It's fine line to walk.  Wish me luck!

May your days be merry and bright, unless you're hungover, in which case, may they be dimly lit and quiet, and I hope someone brings you a greasy breakfast sandwich and a fountain Coke.

 

Syllabus #231

Today is the best day of the year - Finnish Bread Day.  As soon as I click 'publish' on this bad boy, I'm getting right into the kitchen right over to a different part of the kitchen to get started. It's kind of hard to be downstairs in my house and not be in the kitchen.  But I digress.  

My grandmother has eaten this bread at Christmas basically every one of the 90 years of her life.  We used to make it together every December 23rd so we would have a loaf to enjoy on Christmas morning.  Now, I need to bake it earlier than usual so that Ye Olde USPS can deliver it to her before Christmas Eve.

Iowa was an excellent teacher of this craft.  Over the years, she gradually let me take over more of the process until I was doing most of the work.  I say let, and maybe she was strategically scaffolding and building my confidence, but I think the last couple times we made bread together, she was also glad not to be standing at the counter, punching and kneading dough.  

The bread I make alone somehow never tastes as good as the bread Iowa and I made together.  However, and I know this is blasphemy to admit, I think my loaves are prettier.  To be fair, I'm working with an oven that was manufactured more recently than the Reagan administration and therefore generally maintains a consistent temperature, and the pan I use is slightly bigger so the loaves are less crowded.  I'll never tell her that, though.

Finnish Bread circa 2015

Finnish bread, 2022

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The worst gifts given, received, or witnessed by Slate staff.  I'm sure I've given some real duds over the years.  I'm not a great gift-giver.  Sometimes I'll have a flash of brilliance and come up with something really thoughtful and unexpected, but most of the time, no matter how much mental energy I put into it, I just end up hoping the intended recipient will furnish an explicit wishlist.  Sorry to everyone who's ever received a well-intended flop from me.  

I come by my tone-deafness honestly, though, if you believe in thoughtlessness being hereditary.  Not that I want to claim any legacy of personality from the paternal side of my family.  But I once witnessed my dad's daughter-from-his-first-marriage* open a package of Christmas gifts from my dad's mother, a woman I'll call a grandmother for the sake of verbal expediency**.  

I recall being about 10 in this story, so let's say it was 1995ish, which puts the gift opener around 20 or so.  I'm in a small, stuffy apartment and everyone is probably smoking except me.  I mostly hate every single one of them for that, and there's a good chance I'm reading a Goosebumps book and hoping to sink so far into the itchy plaid couch cushions that I disappear completely.  

But then the most wonderful thing happens.  This daughter-from-his-first-marriage unwraps a bar of soap.  Okay, normal enough, except this soap is RANK.  It smells like a funeral home and the aroma cuts through the plastic packaging and the wall of cigarette smoke to hit me on the other side of the room.  Then she unwraps another bar of soap.  And another.  Beneath the bars of soap, she unearths another small rectangular package.  Surely not more soap?  Oh no, dear reader.  Finally, something a young 20-something of the mid-90s can truly enjoy.  Cassette tapes!  What did senile old Helen think this modern young woman wanted to rock out to?  Janet Jackson?  Mary J. Blige?  Rod Stewart?

Wrong!  They were...exercise tapes!  On cassette!  Not VHS.  Just plain old for-your-ears-only audio cassette tapes.  Nothing says, I love you granddaughter and want to cultivate your healthy body image like a gift that tells you to get off your ass and sweat it out, then hit the showers 'cause ya dirty.

*I strongly identify as an Only Child and refuse to refer to these children-from-his-first-marriage as siblings.  They are not.  

**Much less grandmother and more senile woman I met a few times, who always called me hon because I'm not sure she actually knew my name, and who thought I was about 6 years old until the day she died, even though I was in college by that point.

In praise of flipping off your friends' doorbell cameras.  That's an idea I can get behind, much like taking a close-up shot of your elbow-pit on a friend's disposable camera so when they get it developed they have to wonder if it's an ass.

Analog Reading:

This was a banner week for reading!

Finished The Heat Will Kill You First.  The author tried to end on an optimistic note, but all I got out of it was, we're gonna be hot, and we're all gonna die.

Read Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson.  After reading about dying from climate change, it was fun to read about the fake problems of 1-percenters in New York City, and how strange it can be to enter that world through marriage after growing up working class.

Read The Guest by Emma Cline.  This was an interesting choice to follow Pineapple Street, as it follows a darker path to attaching yourself to members of elite society.  The protagonist is a 22-year-old sex worker with a drug and alcohol problem, who has worn out her welcome everywhere she goes due to her increasing desperation and decreasing grip on reality.

Just started to read John Updike's sequel to the Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit Remembered.  It feels like going to a high school reunion, catching up on all the hot goss about who became successful against all odds, who had a glow-up, who really let themselves go, who wasted all their potential.  After reading all 4 of the original books at the beginning of this year, it seems fitting to finish out the year with this one, that picks up in 2000, 10 years after Rabbit at Rest.

Syllabus #230

Let it be known that I have achieved a new Wordle streak.  My previous streak ended last year over winter break.  I was up to day 224 when I fell from great heights and experienced disgrace.  After a minor setback earlier this year, I have reclaimed my dignity.  I'm now up to day 229.  I feel like Kramer test driving the car in that episode of Seinfeld.  As improbable as it may seem, I'm just going to ride this out until the wheels fall off.

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The storms on Saturday evening missed us, but just a couple miles to the north of us, not everyone was as lucky.

I appreciate Slate's dueling best-books lists from Laura Miller and Dan Kois. 

I am going to refrain from sharing any thoughts on the situation in the Middle East, other than to say that I wish for peace for the innocent civilians on both sides of the issue.  That being said, I found this Vox article about the history of the keffiyeh to be illuminating.  The bit about the scarf coming into vogue as a generic fashion accessory in the mid-2000s explains so much about why I randomly bought a green keffiyeh for $5 from a store on South Street in 2007 and thought nothing of wearing at the time.  

Analog Reading:

Finished North Woods by Daniel Mason.  It went to some spooky dark places that I wasn't expecting but thoroughly enjoyed.  

Reading The Heat Will Kill You First is not exactly a hopeful experience.  It is a highly engaging, compelling read, though.  I was reading it yesterday morning on the balcony while it was 59 degrees at 7 am, in December, and then hours later I found myself following the track of a tornado as it ripped through an area just a couple miles north of us.  I can't wait to be boiled alive, killed in a catastrophic storm, or wiped out by a previously-tropical insect-borne disease.  

Syllabus #229

Anyone who has ever worked in a school knows that a full moon has very real, highly pernicious effects on children's behavior.  The Full Beaver Moon of this past week sounds like something I would get arrested for.  Truly, all I can say is thank gawd the FBM didn't coincide with the PMS, or, dear reader, I would have gotten arrested.  And not for a cute little indecent exposure charge.  The way these children made it an olympic-level sport to be as obnoxious as possible.  Unreal.

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Hello, it's me.  I don't actually do this.  If you're a cop, I DEFINITELY DO NOT DO THIS.  I actually avoid self-checkout on principle, but I did steal a grapefruit once out of frustration and a desire to reclaim my time.

Myyyyyy liver in fight - Afternoon delight!  I find that day drinking, if there's a clear endpoint, works out much better for me than night drinking.  If I can sober up and put another meal on top of whatever booze, before going to sleep at night, the next day is going to be a lot more tolerable.

Macaulay Culkin, National Treasure.  I don't use this phrase lightly (actually I throw it around like confetti, but I mean it) 

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Analog Reading:

I've been vibing all week on North Woods by Daniel Mason.  I was expecting a fairly conventional book about the lives of the various inhabitants of a cabin in the Massachusetts woods over many generations.  It IS about the inhabitants of a cabin over many generations, but it's so much weirder and more inventive than I was led to expect.  Every era is recounted in a totally different narrative fashion, and the story is taking some strange and spooky turns I did not see coming.  It's good!