I Love Food and Food Loves Me

Eat clean. Do it because it tastes so very good. I mean, it's nice to go to the grocery store and be told by the person behind you in line that you eat really healthy. Then it's not so nice to get your bill, because fresh is always more expensive than packaged, even when you don't buy meat because you only eat it on special occasions. But then you get home and have these kinds of meals:

Cauliflower soup
Rutabaga and potatoes sautéed in olive oil and garam masala (I made that one up myself)
Cucumbers in lime juice
Red peppers dipped in edamame hummus
Spaghetti squash with tomato-barley sauce
Green salad with four kinds of lettuce, shredded cabbage, and cilantro
Butternut squash soup, in vegetable stock

And finally, do it because it feels classy to eat a meal of vegetables whilst sitting in a clean apartment decorated with glass vases full of purple flowers.

That's what I do. I don't have a social life, but I sure have a culinary life.

On Moving

Because I know there are so many readers out there who are avidly awaiting an account of my move, I will give one.

I drove 19 hours to my new home, passing through 7 states and stopping 4 times (three times to refuel the vehicle, once to sleep).

The southern states are quite picturesque, so I will give a somewhat detailed account of each one:

1. East Texas. What’s not to love? There’s a great Texas icon on the East side of Dallas. I, however, had seen it all before, so the most exciting part was how quickly I got to Louisiana.

2. Louisiana is much prettier than I expected, based on the view from I-20. Most of it was dead trees (it was January) and fields, with the occasional boggy swamp. Some of the cities didn’t smell too nice, but we won’t hold that against them. I stopped in Shreveport, and the girl at the cash wrap called me honey.

3. Mississippi was more of the same.

4. I was advised that when I got to Alabama I should just keep on driving without a stop, however, I ran out of gas and was really, really hungry. The drivers were friendly, but the people at the filling station weren’t. They ignored me at the sandwich shop, which was just as well, because I’m not crazy about food obtained from filling stations. I’m sure it’s sanitary, but it doesn’t seem like it could be.

5. It took so long to actually get to Georgia that I began to wonder if I had missed the “Welcome to Georgia” sign. I was feeling pretty good, to the point that I almost decided not to stop in Atlanta for the night according to my plan. But I hit a wall as soon as I passed through. The drivers all seemed really rude, and the bright lights of downtown started to blur together. So I did the intelligent thing and found a hotel. I am beginning to wonder if it is common in the South to have a limit on how hot the shower water can get, because in Georgia, as well as here in NC, it’s plenty warm, but not warm enough to turn my skin red the way I like it. Scalding hot showers are the only reason I survive winter anywhere. Anyway, after about 4 hours of sleep, shower, and a free hotel breakfast, I got back on the road bright and early.

6. South Carolina was the prettiest to look at, from the 20 anyway. So many rivers. I never realized it before, but I love being able to drive over a river. People back in the day didn’t have that privilege, so I have decided not to curb my enthusiastic enjoyment of it.

7. Then I got to North Carolina, and everything since then has just been a big blur.


Here are a few fun (or commonplace) facts:

If you tell people in North Carolina that you just moved from Texas, they want you to A) decide on the spot whether you’re for Duke or UNC, or B) display your outrageous Texas pride by procuring a flag or a twangy accent. Sometimes both.

Air mattresses are cold.

Trees are everywhere!

Trader Joe’s is a great place, especially if you don’t have any cookware or utensils. Eating baked potatoes with your hands after cutting them up with scissors is pretty cool once, but not for a whole week. I recommend the butternut squash soup, although the stuff I make myself is much better and doesn’t have sugar in it.

Don’t move Back East without a GPS or a handheld device with a google map. Even with one of said devices, you will probably get lost.

You can’t always trust the Meetinghouse Locator on the Church website. I went to the wrong ward on Sunday. But then I went to the right ward, and we have a Singing Sunday School class and a seriously cool bishop (he invited me to have dinner with his family and the missionaries, and afterwards, we all played their 8-year-old daughter’s Roboticized Uno game).

You can seriously buy a huge bag of collard greens cut up and ready to go, just like spinach back home, but I won’t … partake.

When the photographer took my photo for my work ID badge, it actually came out rather nice. How often does that happen? We'll see how the driver's license photo does ...

By Popular Request (Heather)

The Art of Pie.

Pie should not be difficult to make. I think it's hard for me because I stubbornly refuse to use recipes.

However, I used the apple pie recipe in my Better Homes and Gardens standard cookbook, and I followed it so closely (well, for me, anyway). What happened?

It burned.

Black.

I blame the oven. It was overenthusiastic. It had nothing to do with the fact that I put it in to bake and promptly went back to bed.

The tragedy of the burning of the apple pie was that I didn't exactly follow the crust recipe. I made a crumble for the top, involving hazelnuts ground up in the food processor I tend to forget about. It should have been divine. It would have been divine, had it not burned.

So I did what any self-respecting food artiste would do. I took it to the company dinner anyway, and then guilted my friends into eating it, burnt crust and all.

That was a dry run, the week before actual Thanksgiving day. The real pie was yet to be created.

In my own defense, my trusty BH&G cookbook had no recipes for berry pie. I call that gross neglect in covering the basic food groups, but that is immaterial.

I went online, because that's what we milliennials do when we want to cook. I found dozens of raspberry pie recipes. So I glanced through enough of them to assume I had got the hang of it, then I went to the kitchen and started shelling hazelnuts again. This time it wasn't as time consuming because I had a nut cracker that actually believed in cracking nuts. And because Gingey helped (Yay, Gingey!).

The root of the problem was that I assumed that when you see cornstarch as an ingredient, you can just estimate how much you need, and I didn't put nearly enough. Not only that, but I forgot to follow the recipe I invented for the crumble top, and I put excessive amounts of butter.

I'd like to say we had raspberry pie for Thanksgiving, but it was more like raspberry soup. However, the point is that it tasted good. That, after all, is essential to the art of baking a pie.

Proof that it tasted good? Gingey ate at least four "slices".

Incidentally, I bought some more raspberries yesterday, and I still have an entire bag of hazelnuts left. For anyone who has the patience to come over and help me crack them, there will be pie with your name on it. And it will be a work of art.

On Blogging

It's hard to blog (is it strange to you how many verbs are seeping into polite conversation?) without an Internet connection, so I'm just going to make a list of the topics I would have posted about in the past few months had I shelled out the funds for it.

Mistborn, book review of an obsession-inducing trilogy

The Art of Pie

Turkey Day. Yuck. Haven't we figured out it's about the mashed potatoes?

Anyone Can Draw (?)

I don't agree that All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. But I probably did learn it when I was five.

You did not give birth to that dog, so why do you refer to yourself as its "mommy"? The limitations of the English language

Expound if you will.

The Truth

The truth is that I am not as nice as I assume I am.

We live life based upon a set of assumptions about ourselves, otherwise every moment would be too overwhelming to survive, and not just for those with the emotional range of a teaspoon.

However, sometimes I find myself in situations where I am decidedly not the person I assume, and it is uncomfortable. I say things that are unkind. Or I interrupt people. Or I talk endlessly about myself and don't really listen to people. Or I even encourage them in negative thoughts, conversations, and behaviors. Then I think about it later and realize my actions were contemptible. I realize that I had no business to say or do what I did, and I wonder how I let myself get out of hand, because I'm supposed to be better than that. My self respect is intact because I wake up every day assuming that I am not the sort of person who does those kinds of things.

So today, most of all, I am thinking about the ability to re-evaluate my life and repent. The Lord gave that blessing to me, because I sure need it—and that is what I am most grateful for. Today hasn't been about a gluttonous turkey fest (my fam went out of town, and I stayed behind to be with my sister, who had to work; I cooked a nice meal, without any turkey, and was just happy to be able to do something nice for someone else for a change). It's been about what I can do to change my attitude, my thoughts, my words, and my deeds and actually be the person He wants me to be.

Bad experiences don't mean anything if you don't respond to them with faith, so my leap of faith is starting now, with being thankful for the people I usually talk badly about. There are people who have hurt me deeply; I have allowed their choices and/or personalities to make me angry. But it's not my place to get angry, it's my place to be grateful, for the good and for the bad.

The truth is also that I happen to be one of those people whose life is overwhelmingly full of good things over bad things.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I hope you have as much to be grateful for as I do.

A Truth Universally Acknowledged

This is going to be a long, somewhat pretentious post.

I think people assume I like Jane Austen a lot more than I really do. Occasionally, a friend will assume that I have even gone as far as to read some of the endless (brainless) Jane Austen spinoff books. I must admit to having read one of them, Jane Fairfax. It was awful, and I will never touch another one again, even if it isn’t a bodice-ripper, which most of them are. For the record, Jane Fairfax was a tame, if stupid, retelling of Emma, from the point of view of the titular character. Can you see that working?

The fact is that when it comes to literature written by women, I prefer Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and even Virginia Woolf. My favorite book in the world will probably always be Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and North and South will remain in the top 10. I can’t say I will re-read Virginia Woolf often, but when I read The Waves, I wanted to underline the entire text, it was so beautiful.

However, I do love Jane Austen and will freely admit to having read all of her completed works, including Love and Freindship and The History of England, comic pieces she wrote in her teens—some of them multiple times. (No, I have not forgotten how to spell. She wrote the novella before spellings were standardized, and that has always been its official title.) And if you want a good, solid spoof, her early works are screaming at you. There are few books I could classify as being funnier than L&F and HofE.

Sometimes I come across recommendations for books on Amazon.com, and I can’t seem to leave them alone. Eventually I add them to my wishlist, and at some point they end up in my hands. This was one of them. I resisted for a long time, but temptation got the best of me, and I caved in a big way.

But it was thirty-three chapters of what I love best! I make fun of myself often and roundly for liking to read the introduction to a book just as much as I like to read the book itself—and I can’t seem to get over a mania for Norton Critical Editions of classic works—because of all the fun literary essays in the back. With that explained, what could be better than an entire book of literary essays by intelligent people—most of them great fiction writers themselves—about Jane Austen? My favorites were probably by Lionel Trilling, who I am guessing is a famous Jane Austen scholar. He started one of his essays by recounting the creation of a university class focusing entirely on Jane Austen, and realizing it was so full the only fair way to pare it down was to have each student come to his office for an interview. He was startled and dismayed to find out that not only did all these students come and interview, but they were not at all put out by having to justify their reasons for taking the course—in essence, they had to persuade him of their worthiness to be on the roll in the first place. What followed were bribes, letters of reference by former professors, and desperate pleas … and in the end, those who were excluded were very bitter. What other college class could create such a scenario?

Other essayists included Virginia Woolf (of course), Susannah Clarke (the incomparable author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), C.S. Lewis, Eudora Welty, and E.M. Forster, just to name a few. I must say, too, that these people know how to write a good essay. I didn’t get tired of reading about the same person or the same six books until the very end. And even though I was heartily glad to have gotten through the entire collection, I was a little sad there wasn’t more.

Talk about pontification.

One of the greatest things I take away from this experience is a greater appreciation for a writer who can capture the comedy of everyday life. It is quite fair to state that there is nothing in Jane Austen’s work that is paradigm challenging, or that stands out as making them essential to the canon of great literature. This is even more true if you are coming from the perspective of a male.

But as a woman, Jane Austen is worthwhile for several reasons, the most prominent of which is that her work shows, in a way that is light-hearted and amusing, issues that women have dealt with and continue to deal with no matter what era they live in. What do you do when the people you are hanging out with are giving you a bad reputation? What do you do when the sister you love is destroying her future? What do you do when your family members are idiots? What do you do when you don’t have any money but you still want to be respectable? What do you do when it looks like the only respectable life is earned through securing the hand and heart of a respectable man, but there are so few respectable men to be found? What do you do when you have a sincere desire to see everyone around you happy, but they are constantly stepping on you? What do you do when someone you love and trust disapproves of a decision you made?

Real dilemmas, tackled in a hopeful and fun way.

Jane Austen looks at the small picture, focusing on three or four families in a country village. She lived through the war with Napoleon. She had a family member lose a husband to the guillotine. She wasn’t stupid or unaware of the big picture.

But she wrote about relationships, because for women, everything boils down to relationships. Shakespeare writes about kings and princes, Dickens writes about great philanthropists and adventurers, Dostoyevsky writes about the philosopher. They are great authors, and their works are much more striking as contributions to a societal significance. Jane Austen, well, she helps people feel connected.

Inequality

I have probably been reading too much mass media lately, because I find myself very cynical about the future. But one morning a few days ago, as I was doing some cooking, I was reminded of a story told by one of the speakers in General Conference not long ago. I’m going to paraphrase that story.

Two men shared a field that they both worked to plant, tend, and harvest. One of the men lived alone, while the other one had a large family. One day, perceiving an inequality, the first man decided it wasn’t fair that he should get a half share of the harvest when he had only himself to provide for. So he went out in the night and transferred a large portion of the harvest to the pile of his neighbor and went to bed happy. Meanwhile, the second man perceived an inequality. He decided it wasn’t fair that he should get a half share of the harvest when he had so many sons to help him and his neighbor was all alone. So he went out in the night and transferred a large portion of the harvest to the pile of his neighbor and went to bed happy. In the morning, when the discovery was made what had happened in the night, they talked it over and were touched and amused, and they parted friends.

What strikes me about this is that neither one of them had very much—they were just simple farmers—but both of them were able to see that they had blessings beyond those of their neighbor, and their first thoughts were of sharing. I would assume that the sonless neighbor would have shared food from his own table if there were ever any want in the house of his friend. I would assume that the family man neighbor would have taken in his friend in their waning years so that he wouldn’t suffer old age uncared for.

This story wasn’t about a Utopia, or an idealistic dream of world peace and equality. There wasn’t any protesting or sitting around in parks. It wasn’t someone demanding his rights or shirking his responsibilities. Neither one of them went to the government to demand that their neighbor’s taxes be raised, and neither of them whined that they had less and should therefore be entitled to more of a share. Neither of them sat in opulence and judged the other’s difficulties or asked for a loan to buy something that would make their workload lighter. They didn’t give away anything they didn’t have. They didn’t complain that they didn’t have money to hire someone else to do the heavy work. They didn’t call each other a liar or a hypocrite; they didn’t blame each other for not having more of a harvest.

They worked hard, they thanked God, and they loved their neighbor.

The American people are generous. I think maybe not all, but most, want what is good for their neighbors as well as what is good for themselves. And if that isn’t true, well… we have a hard road ahead of us. But I, for one, would wish to live my life like those two fine farmers, refusing to see myself as less fortunate than my neighbor, and striving to always eradicate what inequalities I can.

Curry

As a former teacher, I feel quite adept at giving grades. I kind of hate doing it, though. Mastery of reading, writing, listening, and speaking is very hard to quantify. But it’s pretty much a law that teachers in public schools have to give grades, so I did it a lot—so much that I sometimes internally grade things in my regular life. The result? A progress report on my new apartment.

Refrigerator: 70
This grade is based on performance, as well as interference in regular daily activities, such as sleeping. Full marks for functionality, but minus 10 for freezing my cottage cheese and minus 20 for making noises that sound like someone breaking and entering through my kitchen window after dark.

Air Conditioning Unit: 80
I started to rate this one lower, but the A/C can’t help the fact that I forget to turn it off sometimes when I leave for work. The minus 20 is actually for rattling the building so violently my closet door clicking up against the sticky paint job in its frame begins to sound like a Harley engine. I generally try not to whine about stuff like this, but when you live by yourself, nights can be a little scary, and any extra noise is unwelcome. Still, an 80 is a B, and I do appreciate having a cool place to live.

And now, on to a list of comparisons for effectiveness at removing the reek of tobacco left behind by the previous resident:

Leaving the windows open: 10
Only effective the moment the window is actually open, thus not so useful when it’s hot outside or when one would like to sleep and feel safe.

Home Fragrance Mist, Kimono Rose: 20
I really like the smell of this stuff, but it fades within half an hour. Plus, it doesn’t smell as good as it did in the store.

Scentsy warmer, Flirtatious, Coconut Lemongrass: 50
I am particularly fond of the Flirtatious smell, too, in spite of the prejudice I feel against it for its ridiculous name. The problem with Scentsy is that the little scented wax bricks don’t last forever, and you can only leave it on for five hours at a time—obviously not when you’re absent. So they’re great when I’m home, but I want something to get rid of the reek that punches me in the face when I walk in the door.

Scentsy warmer, Coconut Lime Verbena: 60
This one gets an extra ten points because it’s very strong. It was much more effective against the smell of eighth graders, though.

Bath and Body Works Scentportable, Pink Sangria, Pink Lemonade: 75
One of these is in my closet, the other is in the living room. They are very nice after they’ve been out for a few days. Eventually I’ll have to replace them. It’s a good thing I got them on sale. I always meant to save them for my car.

Yellow curry, cooked over the stove with garlic, mushrooms, and lentils: 100
What else is there to say? I made dinner earlier this week and thoroughly enjoyed it before putting away the leftovers. I forgot all about it. Then, when I stepped in the door after work for the next two days, all I smelled was curry.

Which of these things does not belong here? There you have it. Even after subtracting points for staining my countertop, thus disqualifying me from reclaiming my cleaning deposit when I move out, curry wins.

☺

Beauty is ...

watching the newest Jane Eyre movie twice in one day. I love this movie so much it's ridiculous. The DVD cover is a disappointment, to be sure, and my sister and I decided a long time ago that sidewhiskers are, without exception, one of those fashions (like bangs from the '80s) that are best forgotten. But I still love it with an immortal passion.

Want v. Need

People usually talk about wants and needs in the context of spending money, but after a discussion with family members yesterday, I'm left with some questions about this dilemma—but referring to doing stuff instead of buying stuff.

They pretty much said all of my problems might be solved (yup) if I could figure out how to turn off my need to be nice.

Apparently most people are nice because they want to be, and I'm nice because I need to be.

Maybe, though, I don't really need to be nice, I just think I do. I'm sure I'm not the only one, which is why I'm blogging about it (although I've said before and will say again that this blog shares entirely too much personal information).

Am I the only one with this problem? Because the truth is that when you're trying to decide how to spend money, or time, or other resources, it's not too hard to distinguish between what you need and what you want. But when it comes to deciding whether you want to do something nice for someone because you want to, or because you need to in order to feel okay with yourself, it gets much trickier. If you try to turn it off, it creates horrible cycles of inward guilt and angst and agony, usually ending in rage.

Then, there is the insulting insinuation that I'm not really nice of my own initiative, but because I have an emotional illness. What can one do to counter that?

I was never a Friends watcher, but I was told about an episode where the Lisa Kudrow character was accused of being selfish because she got so much pleasure out of doing nice things for people, and the point was that there really isn't any way we can do something purely, unconditionally philanthropic because there's always payoff.

I'm afraid I might have meandered a bit too much with this one, but what I really wanted to say was—does it really matter why you do nice things, as long as you're doing them?

Because I'm not that nice to begin with.

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick. You either love him or don't get him, I think. I've been interested in his films since I fell in love with The New World, which is basically a poem written to Pocahontas and early America in the form of a movie.

Now, I'm usually willing to believe that if most people hate it, it isn't good. But Terrence Malick's films are one exception, particularly The Tree of Life. This was no Where the Wild Things Are. I bring that up because it was another highly anticipated film that a lot of people went to see and walked out booing. To each his own, really, but I was a booer on that one. However, I felt the loud booing and complaining about The Tree of Life was completely unwarranted.

Have you seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? It is the closest comparison to The Tree of Life I can come up with. Pretty much a beautiful series of images, with a little bit of dialogue and lots of questions as whispered voiceover, it was graceful and ponderous and stylistically daring. I loved it.

Malick has a way of using actors who are already famous in ways that people aren't used to seeing them—in The New World it was Colin Farrell, Christian Bale, and Christopher Plummer—and mixing them up with unknowns like Q'Orianka Kilcher, whose innocent beauty was enchanting. The Tree of Life claimed to star Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, but the real star was Hunter McCracken, in a performance that leaves almost every child/adolescent actor looking like a piece of candy or a dirty kleenex.

Child actors are an interesting study. For example, Shadowlands is a biopic of C.S. Lewis made several years ago, starring Anthony Hopkins and Deborah Winger. I highly recommend it, but to this day, I'm not sure if Joseph Mazzello was good or if Attenborough just knew how to use a kid in a heck of an effective way. In the case of Hunter McCracken, I'm pretty sure it was both. He had so much screen time it couldn't have been just the stellar directing.

I think that the touch that took it from being just an interesting series of images that were both cleverly and lyrically filmed (can a picture be lyrical? I say yes) to being what Roger Ebert describes as "a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives ... [with] fierce evocation of human feeling" is the music. Alexandre Desplat did the score, but only a few minutes of that actually made the cut. Most of it was timeless pieces by Holst, Smetana, Berlioz, Mahler, and others, with my personal favorite piece, "Lacrimosa" by Zbigniew Preisner. Just listen to it.

Grief really is the universal theme, and what I liked about this film is that it truly was simply a meditation on the grief one feels over losing a family member—how knowing that life has been going on and on for so long and people have been living and dying for centuries doesn't make any person's individual sorrow any less cosmic. But all the same, life is beautiful regardless of all of that.

It might have been a long, slow, meandering film with a few really strange scenes, but I loved that Malick tackled such a subject, and that he did it with sensitivity and taste.

And then ....

I found $20.

My friend just taught me that phrase. Has it ever happened to you? You've been telling a story, and it's just not going where you expected it to, and the people who are listening are obviously tuning out, their eyes glazing over or searching the room for a polite comment they can make that will serve to distract and interrupt you? You get the hint (duh), and instead of branding yourself forever as the teller of boring stories, you wrap it up quick with a completely unrelated punchline—"And then, I found $20."

Try it. It's brilliant.

Commencement

Who actually likes going to Commencement ceremonies? I don't see any hands raised.

I taught my first class of 8th graders five years ago, and they just graduated on Friday night. Go them! As a token of my sentimental heart, I even braved being in the car for another fifty minute drive (one way) so I could be there.

What I will say for this small town is that they sure know how to put on a graduation. It was outdoors in their stadium, and at the end of May, the weather is usually nice for it—nice for people like me, at any rate, who don't start sweating the second it gets above 70 degrees. The breeze was nice enough to keep things comfortable but not so strong that it messed up my hair. That was a good thing, because I used a flat iron for the first time in about a year.

The other great thing about it was that the wind kept hitting the microphones so we didn't have to hear very much of the speeches. I was slightly disappointed I couldn't hear the salutatorian better, but oh, well. He's a good kid, and I could guess what he said.

And—here's the most remarkable thing—all the administrators and community organization representatives kept their speeches short and sweet! Nothing over five minutes. Wow. It shifted the focus to the actual graduates, who were able to walk leisurely down their strip of track, get their diplomas, hug the announcers, and get their tassels switched.

It was all over in less than 90 minutes. I think that might be record timing.

Nonverbal Punctuation

I just noticed that people punctuate with things like smiley faces [ :) ] and other facial expressions. Our written language is becoming more sophisticated, maybe.

But also more confusing. My 8th graders asked me once why I was using frowny-faces on the dry erase board. It was because I was giving them a dictionary-style definition--

Frown : ( noun ) an unhappy facial expression, otherwise known as a colon and an opening parenthetical mark.

Heavy-handed Metaphors

Amazing Grace is one of my favorite movies. Beautiful story, beautiful script, beautiful acting. It's even based (somewhat loosely—I do so love Rufus Sewell, but he/the writers took some serious liberties with the character of Thomas Clarkson) on true events.

In one of the scenes, Wilberforce and Pitt have a footrace across the yard, with no shoes. At the end, Wilberforce says something about how he can never feel the thorns until he stops running; Pitt replies that he just needs to keep running.

"Is that some heavy-handed metaphorical advice for me, Mr. Pitt?"

How does this apply to today? It doesn't. Not really. I'm always trying to think of fantastic extended spiritual metaphors for my experiences with running. It doesn't work—everything I come up with just sounds pretentious.

So, for the record, I used to have a vague idea that if once I ran a marathon, distance running would forever after become a no-pain, no-sweat walk in the park. Not so. Running is killing me! Sometimes I don't even want to do it.

I had to positive self-talk my way from beginning to end this evening, and it was only 3 miles.

To give myself a little credit, I am learning to run a new way, and it takes its toll on some leg muscles I haven't developed yet. That, and there is the full time job that has to be worked around.

Sometimes I wish I had some heavy-handed metaphorical advice from Billy Pitt. After all, he became Prime Minister at the age of 23.

Style

I am just now reading The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. I wonder, after having this long-standing love affair with words and phrases and clauses and sentences and paragraphs, how I never knew enough to actually read this book.

It seems I thought I didn't need to read it, expert that I am in the mechanics of the written word. Not so. Chock full of examples of such terms as participial phrases, pronominal possessives, and adjectival modifiers, it is every language lover's dream come true.

I think it ought to be required reading for every speaker and writer of the English language.

Are People Getting Crabbier?

The other day I was in CVS buying conditioner and a new scrubby sponge. As I completed my transaction, the line suddenly got really long, and the cashier was visibly stressed. Then a customer came up asking an odd sort of question, saying she had been told by the guy in the back to come to the front. The cashier promptly set her phone to intercom, and yelled into it,

"Raymond, do your job right!"

Wow. I thanked her and gave her a nervous smile before going on my merry way.

I don't condemn, because I have worked in retail before, and it's a tough business, but I really wonder why that's suddenly acceptable behavior when even a few years ago it would probably have gotten her fired.

One of the titles of the TLA workshops was "Are People Getting Crabbier?"

My answer to that is an emphatic YES.

On Books (Part Ten)

I know everyone read my post about meeting Gary Schmidt, so I won't go into that again, but I just finished reading Okay For Now. It was joyous.

Well, mostly. I can't say I don't have reservations about the ending, but overall it was wonderful. You know, that kind of wonderful that makes you laugh out loud (ask D, she heard me over the course of several days) and cry sudden tears.

How the diddly does an author manage to weave Jane Eyre into a story about a teenage boy from a dysfunctional family during the Vietnam Era? I'm not even kidding. I recognized that familiar feeling of angst that you feel when you start reading Jane Eyre—the angst that comes from hearing an intimate first-person account of an abused child who has no-one to turn to and no-one to trust—at the beginning of the book. Little did I know that he was actually going to start quoting Jane Eyre, and that the parallels would spring up multitudinously from that point on.

This is the reason I love Gary Schmidt. He did it with The Wednesday Wars, and he did it again with this one. Great, unpretentious beauty.

That, and the little, ironic jokes he cracks that you might miss if you're not paying attention—so that when you don't miss them, you totally feel like it's an inside joke that very few people even care about—just like my Shakespeare prof used to do back in the college days. And also, even though everything is a little too contrived in these books, I still really enjoy his depiction of kids who don't care about a whole lot finding sudden inspiration and renewed love of life by devoting themselves to unexpected talent in one of the art forms. In The Wednesday Wars it was theatre, and in Okay for Now, it's drawing—which goes right back to Jane Eyre! Doug learns how to draw from one of the public librarians' guidance, combined with his fascination with the works of Audobon. And, because this is Gary Schmidt writing, everything he looks at in the pictures, and everything he draws, has meaning elsewhere in Doug's life—and that's a good thing, because Doug's life was pretty crappy for the most part.

The title of this post leads one to believe that it is about more than one book, which it is. Right about the time I started reading Okay for Now, I also started a new job, which in and of itself is rather wonderful, but I'm not going into that here. The point is that even when you're gainfully employed, finding the time to read isn't that difficult. However, finding the time to read entire books at once sure is.

I can't remember the last time I started reading a book that short (only 360 pages), that I liked that much, and that I was also willing to put down when it came to doing other stuff. It reminds me of when I read The View From Saturday, and around the middle I thought, "Wow, I want to stop reading after this chapter, because I like this book so much I want it to last as many days as I can make it last."

As opposed to, "Wow, this book is so good I'm not going to do anything else until I finish it!"

Do you have those types of thoughts?

Yes, yes. We established a long time ago that I read too many books. But maybe I'll read fewer books now that I edit accounting manuals all day (which is much, much more fun than it sounds—trust me).

Texas Library Association Annual Conference!

What could be more fun than going to Austin to meet up with 6,000 other librarians? It's a great place for meeting up with people and networking, not to mention going to super-fun sessions on various topics such as "Powerpoint on Steroids," helping teachers with research projects, helping students get ready for college, and arranging library programs to encourage kids to read more books. The last one, which I actually attended first, is always a learning experience because even after all these years it still doesn't make sense to me that anyone would need encouragement to read more books—I've been trying to convince myself for years that I need to read fewer books.

The best part is always the book signing. Last year Janeheiress stalked Shannon Hale in order to get her autograph, but I didn't have to resort to author stalking. My awesome friend D and I were wandering around, collecting as many free books as we could get ahold of, when I passed a booth where the attendant was holding up a copy of Gary Schmidt's newest book, Okay For Now.

I said, "Oh, I love Gary Schmidt!"

She said, "He's sitting right there."

Sure enough, he was. Sitting right there. What else was there to do but buy the book and tell him while he signed it how much I (and some of my 8th graders) loved The Wednesday Wars. And as he was handing me back my book, Richard Peck walked up and cracked a joke. It took me a few seconds too long to process that it was Richard Peck, because authors look like normal people and he has a voice like a car salesman, exactly the sort of voice you would expect from a writer of such side-splitting comedies as A Long Way From Chicago and The Teacher's Funeral—if I had realized sooner who it was I would have shook his hand. As it was, I just stared with my mouth open while he walked away, presumably to get some lunch in the crowded and overpriced Exhibition Café (yeah, I bought a vegan wrap and 2 pieces of fruit for $10.75—yummy food, yucky prices).

Another highlight of the week was eating dinner at The Oasis, with a lovely, peaceful view of Lake Travis at sunset. The fish tacos were pretty good, but not as good as the ones I make at home (and where the heck did my modesty and humility run off to?).

I didn't mean this post to feature food so much, but I have to admit that a large portion of how much fun I think I have on a trip out of town is due to how good the food is. What's the point of going to a different city if you can't splurge on stuff you never get at home? So on the last day of the conference, we walked to the crèpe place a few blocks from the conference center. I ordered the Norwegian, and the waitress was so great she let me get rid of the tomato and replace it with asparagus. It was quite wonderful to eat a smoked salmon and asparagus crèpe while sitting outside in the April sunshine.

And finally, what is better than a Belgian waffle maker in your hotel lobby? Well, a Texas-shaped Belgian waffle maker, of course.

Austin is a lovely place. I think I'll go back sometime soon.

Rage

The only way to curb it is to spend a little time at the book store. Who stays mad after browsing the titles of Robert Jordan? Knife of Dreams!