My sister fundamentally changed my life when she suggested that instead of a film with Justine Waddell or Colin Firth, I should go for something with Bruce Willis. She loaned me her edited copy of Die Hard. My favorite part?
"Ho Ho Ho. Now I have a machine gun."
And then, I just saw the trailer for Red 2, and I don't even know who this person is who is so excited. Where did I go?
1. To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis. If one says nothing of the dog, one can say a lot about this comedy of errors based on the adventures of a time-lagged historian whose attempts to escape his unreasonable and domineering sponsoress's insane demands lead him back to the Victorian era in search of a blunder, in the form of a disrupted love story, an appallingly ugly family heirloom, and a lost cat, that so disordered the space-time continuum that everyone's life in the future is threatened. It's immeasurably funnier if you have read Shakespeare and the major Victorians. There is little I love in a book more than literary humor, and I was laughing out loud for most of the book. 8
2. The Alloy of Law, Brandon Sanderson. A story set in the same universe as his famous Mistborn series (which I read last year), this one is a fun pastiche of science fiction and the Wild, Wild West. And the character dynamics don't stoop to cliché. 7
3. Shadows in Flight, Orson Scott Card. At long last I got to read what happens to Bean. I love Bean. But this book was just okay. No love, no hate. The somber ending didn't overwhelm me like that of the last book he was in—it fell a bit flat. Normally if I don't love a book I can think up a better ending for myself. This one I couldn't, because maybe there wasn't a better way to end it, and maybe it didn't need to be ended. I dunno. 4
4. Coronets and Steel, Sherwood Smith. We are long-time fans of Sherwood Smith. This new series was the perfect way to engage my mind in a fun action-adventure story right after I moved across the country. What is not to love about a fencing, ballet-dancing history graduate student from California who finds herself in a mysterious family feud in Eastern Europe while on a crazy quest to figure out her grandmother's past? 6
5. Blood Spirits, Sherwood Smith. Spoiler Alert. I can't say I loved the sequel as much as the original. It went the vampire direction. Justify that if you will, but vampires are so cliché I was a bit disgusted when the story took that turn about 2/3 through the book. 5
6. His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik. You know, I love Bromances, and this is really the ultimate in Bromance, except the Bros are a man and a dragon. I wasn't prepared for how endearing the dragons would be, because most dragon stories don't have likeable dragons. There are lots more books in this series. We'll see if I get around to them.6
7. Between Shades of Grey, Ruta Sepetys. This book was practically a Holocaust book, even though it started out in Lithuania and I think it was the Russians rather than the Germans committing the atrocities. I feel like American pop culture's obsession with that time is disrespectful in a way I can't describe adequately. The book was good, but to say a book like this (based on true events and the suffering of real people) is good seems very callous. However, the fact that these people might have wanted their story told and it didn't get crowded out by more popular concentration camp tales is fine with me. They were thrown onto trains and carted out to remote areas of the Russian territory, where they were forced to work on communal farms for almost no food, and ended up being shipped to the North Pole and left on their own. By the time they were rescued, they were almost all dead. It was really a downer, and I can't give it a rating.
8. Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer. This is one of those pop psychology books that I saw advertised on Amazon. It was the first book I bought to read on my Kindle Touch. A fun read, and very quotable. I might read it again in a few years.6
9. The Queen of Attolia, Megan Whalen Turner. This sequel to The Thief took me completely by surprise. I didn't realize this kind of fantasy got so good! The first book had some tense moments and some brutality, but who expects a love story to open the way this one did? It's a good thing I got the Kindle version, because apparently the paperback cover gives it away, and I think a lot of the impact comes from that one thing being unexpected. 8
10. The King of Attolia, Megan Whalen Turner. Again, I expected these books to be shallow, but they are not. A very fun read about a foreign king winning the respect and allegiance of his people. I don't remember details much, and I will definitely be reading it again soon. 8
11. Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner. Still good. Not quite as strong as the others. We'll see what happens with the fifth book. I expect great things. I have turned my nose up at series books in the past, but occasionally it's ok to break with principle and read them when they're good. 6
12. Ida B., Katherine Hannigan. An okay middle-grade book about a little girl struggling with family and socialization issues. Maybe I'm too hard on it because I've read so many Newbery books, and it seems like middle-grade publishers all want to put out the same story these days. 3
13. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson. I reviewed this on my blog when I read it. I think it's the only Horror genre book I've read, aside from The Prestige. 6
14. A Posse of Princesses, Sherwood Smith. She knows how to do girl power the right way. It was fun, not only because of the lead girl, but because of the ensemble of supporting characters. 5
15. Wild Swans, Jung Chang. I can't remember if I reviewed this book. It's difficult to describe. It is a three-generational memoir beginning with a warlord's concubine, transitioning into the occupation by the Japanese, to the takeover by the Communists, with a detailed account of how it all worked by one who saw it all and left in early adulthood. Of everything I've read this year, Wild Swans probably had the heaviest impact on my intellectual development. Can't give a rating to a real person's life experiences.
16. Room, Emma Donaghue. Hated it. It could have been a Lifetime movie. Someone told me she liked it because it made her think, and that's fine. I like and respect her, but I don't like being made to think about things so sordid—unless maybe they really happened and it would lead to something useful. In this case, it was just a terrible downer with no merit and no utility. 0.5
17. The Virginian, Owen Wister. Already reviewed it. It's good because it was a first. And because the titular character is so endearing. 5
18. Watercrossing, Krissi Dallas. This is the third in an eight-part series my friend and former coworker is publishing. I was one of her early readers and went to publishing conferences with her during its development, so I am very invested in where the story goes. My friend is extremely charismatic and so talented at coming up with things that grab teenagers and the young at heart. I have fun reading them and love and respect what she is doing with her writing (as in, this is probably the only teen magical realism romance out there that doesn't have any sex or bad language). Also, she is another one of the rare women who truly understands how to do girl power the right way, and I am really looking forward to reading the rest of the series. 6
19. Blackout, Connie Willis. Read it. You will love it. Enough said. 8.5
20. All Clear, Connie Willis. Copy #19. This is not a sequel to Blackout, it is part two of a two-volume book. 8.5
21. Palace of Stone, Shannon Hale. Sometimes one reads too many princess books. I really love Shannon Hale as a writer, but the works that get the attention aren't the good ones. This was a sequel to her Newbery award-winning Princess Academy, which was good as princess books go, but there was no need for a sequel. If you want good Shannon Hale, read The Goose Girl. 3
22. These Is My Words, Nancy Turner. A pioneer story about a spitfire girl who crosses dangerous territory with her family to move to Texas, sustaining heavy losses and going back to Arizona. I liked it, I guess, but her voice was too progressive, and it seemed like somebody died on every other page. 5
23. Bellwether, Connie Willis. This might be my favorite of Connie Willis, not because I think it is the best, but because it is the easiest to read. It's trauma free, and every sentence is witty. I especially love the definitions at the beginning of each section. And, well, everyone knows I like to make fun of trendy people, and that was the whole point of this book. 8
24. Passage, Connie Willis. So beautiful. So traumatic. Wow. 8
25. All About Emily, Connie Willis. I've been told that this one would have been a million times funnier if I had seen All About Eve. But I hadn't, and I still managed to laugh hysterically. 8
26. Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner. Book club. I liked it. It was an interesting character study about two married couples and the dynamics of marriages and friendships. 7
27. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut. Already reviewed. 3
28. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert. Finally got around to this one. Well, we all know how it ends, more or less, but it was getting there that was so darkly intriguing. It's difficult to love a book about a woman so caught up in story-book romance that she sabotages her own happiness by feeding a loathing for her husband, her child, and everything else in the world that is mundane and uninteresting. There is a reason this one is a classic. 6
29. Pope Joan, Donna Woodfolk Cross. Already reviewed. 6
30. Beau Geste, Percival Christopher Wren. I liked it pretty well. It was good fun; it reminds me a little of The Four Feathers. Those young British hotheads who wanted to be larger than life could only succeed in adventure fiction that is now practically out of print, probably because it was written by a dude who lived in a very racist time and reflected the attitudes of the day. I watched the movie with my mom—she is a Gary Cooper fan. I might have enjoyed it much more if the chaps playing 20-year-olds hadn't been in their late forties. 5
31. Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones. A crazy fantasy built around my favorite T.S. Eliot poem, based on Tam Lin, about entrapment and betrayal and all kinds of weird stuff. The ending picked me up by the feet, swung me around in circles, and flung me to the other side of the room. I'm still trying to figure out what happened, and that's the beauty of it. 8
And I am convinced there should be a 32 on this list, but I forgot to add it to my spreadsheet, so that's another book I read that I will never remember. Sad.
1. Any opinion that doesn't agree with mine is biased and judgmental.
2. Any discussion board that stays up long enough will contain a post in which one participant calls another a Nazi.
3. Every interactive site will eventually feature a cat video.
4. The more trivial an issue is, the more likely people are to get upset about it (and start calling each other Nazis).
5. Any reference to religious convictions is, in fact, an attempt to violate the separation of church and state.
6. All discussion boards would be, if they adhered to the MPAA system, rated R.
7. Online service agreements change approximately every time you decide to use the service. Or more.
8. It doesn't matter how cool the interface change is, if it happens on a social media network, it will be complained about. Usually accompanied by expletives.
9. No matter how bad the fanfiction is you're reading, it can always get worse.
10. A lot of people blog so they can feel like they did something useful with their time, rather than recognizing it for what it is. Using the internet is practically like pulling that string in the story about the little boy who gets a magical string that controls how time passes in his life. Time, and life, are gone before you know it.
* I'm thinking of deleting my blog again. If you just read this post, the why is self-explanatory. But before I do, feel free to share additional rules.
When I was sixteen I decided I was so ugly I would do anything short of robbing a bank to improve myself. My first step was getting rid of the huge, nasty, obnoxious glasses I had worn under protest since first grade. No, I did not get contacts (my family couldn't afford the kind of contacts I needed and I didn't have a job yet). I just stopped wearing the glasses. The other kids I knew always thought my parents were so authoritarian. Nope. I doubt they ever forced me to do anything (irrelevant tangent: when I was seventeen, I asked them to give me a curfew). And in high school they don't give you a yellow dot for leaving your glasses at home, so there were no negative repercussions to this decision. There were, however, plenty of positives. People, myself included, began to see that my appearance was rather more than tolerable.
Vanity wins every time.
However, recently I discovered that I would need to foray back into the vision-enhanced world. I just said hello to functional depth perception, and it just so happens that this occurred just shy of two years after my graduation from library school.What better way to celebrate librarianship than by purchasing a pair of hipster glasses?
Now, where's my frumpy cardigan?
But, favorite or not, this little man is awesome.
And this one.
When they left, I was sad. And very tired. I went to bed around 5:30 pm and didn't get up until nearly 10:30 the next morning. Then I didn't feel like doing anything, and even if I did, there isn't much to do on holiday weekends when you don't have family around, so I watched a Christmas movie. I have lots of favorite Christmas movies, and here they are in no particular order:
* Love, Actually
* Mickey's Christmas Carol
* Miracle on 34th Street
* It's a Wonderful Life
* Joyeux Noel
We love the French. They always make such depressing profound films. I hate French films, except when I love them. And I love Joyeux Noel. It think it is well nigh impossible not to love a story where music dissolves fear and hatred and gives grieving young men a chance to figure out that the person they thought was their worst enemy was just a friend in disguise. Instead of writing a silly review of it, I'm just going to link to the song in the credits, which doesn't do the rest of the story justice entirely, but is a very sweet song regardless.
Here's a photo for your visual enlightenment. I'm sure you can tell as clearly as I can that this is a superior haircut.
On another note, I dreamed last night that I bought a pair of boots so audacious my imagination broke. This is difficult, because every time I go to the shoe store and look in the clearance section for big feet, there are some pretty darned audacious shoes. It's like they think just because we're tall we want both lots of attention and lots of potential to biff it. And shoes that couldn't possibly go with anyone's professional wardrobe (the less said about possible professional wardrobes some of these shoes would go with the better). Some of these shoes are so tall it's difficult to wear them and accelerate while driving. Wait, though. In my case maybe that's a good thing.
The ones in my dream were patriotic boots, and they morphed as I put them on. It was a long, grueling process, but by the end, they were slick and shiny red and blue, up to mid-thigh, with slits down the middle so they could show enough skin to be all three patriotic colors. They had buttons and laces and zippers and hooks, and the heels were something like six or seven inches. In the dream it was too appalling to laugh, but now I find it very diverting. Butter my butt and call me a biscuit.
And, to change the subject yet again, it is getting down to the wire with my annual reading list. Less than two months to go, and my "To Read" list is still longer than my "Already Read" list. Unless you count all the books I've re-read this year, which is up to at least 17.
I'm trying to finish Beau Geste. This is because at one point I met a really nice guy who said it was his favorite book. This experience may have enabled me to give him a list of a dozen books I think he might like, including The Four Feathers, The Last of the Mohicans, and maybe even Dracula. I imagine he has already read Lord of the Rings. Some guys have a thing for action/adventure books that may or may not be well-written. I can't explain it, but it doesn't bother me unless they make fun of me for reading The Brontes. You take your life in your hands if you say anything derogatory about Jane Eyre in front of me.
Because I do. Read books over and over, I mean. But only if they're good. Harry Potter, for instance. I've read the entire series at least four times since its completion with the publication of The Deathly Hallows. But I re-read the entire series at least every time a new book came out since I was introduced to them after the publication of The Goblet of Fire. That means that if I totaled all the times I've read a book with Harry Potter in the title, the sum would be over 50. I don't know if I should be concerned or not, considering that they are my "happy" books—I read them when I feel overwhelmed and need an escape.
I have probably written before that it irks me a little that people claim reading fiction is only for escape. Sometimes it is, obviously. But more often than not, for me at least, it's for some other reason. Sometimes I read to be cool for somebody (yes, I will admit this ... more on that later). I read because reading a book is just as good as having a conversation with someone, with the added bonus of zero awkwardness because you don't have to go through any small talk or idle chit chat before you get to what they're really all about inside. Rather pathetic, really.
The problem with escapism is that it inevitably ends. As long as the Harry Potter series is, it is always over sooner or later, and then you're left bursting with emptiness because for so many days/weeks you were immersed in another world and have to come crashing back to your own. Always alone.
Sometimes I don't want to read anymore because of that. But I have to keep my mind occupied. Giving up reading is unthinkable, no matter how torturous it is to finish a book and wander around a small apartment with no one to talk to about all the emotions just experienced by being a temporary observer of another universe. I might be able to get along without books if I had hundreds of intellectually stimulating acquaintances who interacted with me on a daily basis.
No, on second thought, I couldn't. Books don't demand anything from you. You can pick one up and read just a sentence before discarding it, and it never knows the difference. And how often have you started a conversation with someone that you wanted to last for one sentence that ended up lasting an hour or more? Yes. People are great, but the very fact that they are people and must be treated with common courtesy makes them too energy inefficient.
This post begins to make me sound cold, so I think I will end it here. The next book I'm reading for my book group is called Pope Joan, which originally I was not thrilled about, then warmed a little to, then finally got less excited again after finding out it's merely a novel. I imagine it will be something like Ophelia, by Lisa Klein, which I read several years ago and which was, as indicated by the title, a back story for Hamlet's tragic love. I gave up on historical fiction years ago, but I'm going to be a good sport and read Pope Joan anyway. I will probably hate it, as I have hated or been indifferent to almost everything we've read in this book group so far. But I think one point of a book club is to read stuff you hate so that you don't get a skewed perspective of how great the literature market actually is. Well, that and you have people who are going to talk about it with you. Liking is always a possibility, and when you don't choose it yourself, there is always the surprise factor. Besides, there are few things more difficult than reading a book you absolutely love only to find out that no one you know has read it and you will spend the rest of your life convincing others that they need to read this book and wishing, wishing you had someone to discuss it with. Until you finish another book, that is.
I'm certain that any hard-core librarians out there would throw rotten fruit at me for calling a book vulgar, but what else is there to call it? I obviously don't believe in "banning" books—and by that, I mean taking them off the shelves of public libraries—unless they are actually illegal. But if I were a parent I would object to my child being assigned to read the book, and I would probably protest it as age-inappropriate in a school library below high school level.
I suppose one of the best things about going to a book club is that if you are wholeheartedly involved, you are forced to read things you normally wouldn't, so it makes your rating system a little more "real". I don't often finish books that I only give one star.
For another example, back in the 80s, no one would expect validation to come from anywhere but another person. Now it's all over the place. Billboards, chocolate wrappers, and my new favorite--cough drops.
If Halls weren't the only one to have grapefruit flavor, I would switch to another brand. I don't think I need validation from a cough drop wrapping.
And, to continue this disconnected post, I will confess that one of the pitfalls I find in living alone came along today: I had to convince myself that it is not acceptable at any level to have candy for dinner just because I don't feel like washing the dishes.
I was reasonably convincing, I think, because dinner is now on the stove, but I think I will still have candy afterwards.
Finally, I like the ring of my title today. You could use it to replace the first line of Julie Andrews singing "My Favorite Things."
Have a lovely evening, y'all folks.
I really think half of the state tried to make it to the rodeo at the same time we did. Traffic was absurd. We gave up after driving about half a mile in half an hour, because some of us were really hungry, the rodeo had already been going for an hour without us, and we just weren't having the fabulous times everyone else seemed to be having. It was fabulous, no joke. But all the other people were sitting in the backs of pickup trucks. Flying Confederate flags. I wish I had been brave enough to take photos, but it was dark and they might have had guns.
In our attempt to escape the rodeo traffic, we ran into a redneck parade, with even more trucks and flags. The whole town must have been out, because Main Street was mobbed with them, as well as spectators. I never knew driving a truck, full of people in shorts with their cowboy boots, and flying a redneck flag was a spectator sport. But it is in Benson, where the population of hipsters seems to equal one.
Even better were the official signs along the side of the road prohibiting equine traffic. What is this place?
When we finally got out of town, we found a place that made authentic Eastern barbecue. Pork sandwiches with cole slaw and hush puppies, drenched in vinegar sauce. I think I might have just seen a snapshot of the real South.
Just for fun, I went to an online dream dictionary, and there it was. Dreaming you are driving a car means that you are in control of your life. Dreaming about braking means that you lack stability. So, in essence, I am in control of a chaotic mess that disconcerts me in my sleep (and, might I add, in my awake as well). That sounds like me.
But I still think dream interpretation is a bit hokey.
On another note, I have this awesome friend who loves to tell me how awesome I am. If you've ever seen the episode of The Vicar of Dibley: The Handsome Stranger, this next bit will be very funny to you. If you haven't seen it, you need to. Trust me, you are missing out on one of the funniest television events in the universe.
So, my awesome friend told me that I am not "on the shelf"--I am in the special display case. In other words, he thinks that whoever marries me will have won the figurative lottery.
That's a sweet sentiment, but I'm afraid that winning the lottery comes with a lot of strings attached. Yes, but he assures me that winning the lottery and paying the associated taxes, etc. is still preferable to not winning the lottery. I think that playing the lottery is gambling, and I don't find that attractive. But I also think I'm overthinking, as usual.
But lately I've been feeling like a loser, and like the last person picked for the soccer team. Instead of making a loser list, I'm going to make a winner list. This is another one of those self-indulgent, somewhat narcissistic posts, where I assume everyone who reads me is as interested in me as I am.
Here is what I won:
I won a get pale in the summer contest I declared against myself after the fact. I didn't think it was possible for someone to get paler than I already was, but I was wrong. I think there is no longer a shade of makeup pale enough for me ... and I ought to know after the effort it took to find the previous color.
I won at going out on another first date. He might think I'm totally weird now and will probably never talk to me again, but at least we went out once. And I had fun even if he didn't.
I won at not passing out on Monday evening when I got suddenly light-headed, dizzy, and nauseated. Never mind that I never should have got sick in the first place and that after I narrowly avoided passing out, I lay on the floor trembling for a good half hour, called my mom even though she's terribly stressed and there was nothing she could do for me anyway, and then had my friend come over because I couldn't even walk to the kitchen for my own drink of water.
I won at finishing the book for my book club in just 2 days. I should have been drinking lots of water and sleeping, but I finished the book instead. If reading were an Olympic sport, I would win.
And...
I won today because I started it so early! Everyone says it's best to have an early start. I was so ahead of today that I woke up for it yesterday. I didn't go to sleep last night, but what does that matter when you can be early enough to work that only one other person is there and most of the lights are still out?
Please excuse me if it isn't funny. This is a desperate attempt to be lighthearted in the face of a brutal couple of weeks.
Titles (it was a two-part book): Blackout, All Clear
The setting: Oxford, England. Year 2060. Mr. Dunworthy's history department is in chaos. Too many historians are going through the net to too many critical times and places, and everyone's having trouble keeping calm. Wardrobe, research, scheduling, and operations are all flying by the seat of their pants. And a Japanese historian has come up with a set of equations that might prove that time travel is destabilizing everything ... dun dun dunnnnnn.
Main Characters:
Polly Churchill, a World War II specialist whose enthusiasm takes her to London, to work as a shopgirl during the Blitz.
Merope/Eileen, another WWII historian whose first assignment lands her in the country residence of Backbury, serving as a housemaid whose employer is taking in about a dozen evacuated children from London's East End (the dodgy part).
Michael Davies/Mike Davis, traveling to Dover to research unsung heroes and covering as an American reporter.
Colin Templer, who first showed up in Doomsday Book as an incorrigible twelve-year-old with a mania for the Crusades, is now seventeen and desperately in love with Polly—desperate enough to try to convince her that he can use time travel to catch up to her in age, if only she will wait for him.
There are lots of other characters, but I won't mention them because the list would get too long and it would mean major spoilage.
Connie Willis writes like no one else. Other readers have complained that her books could benefit from tighter editing, but oddly enough, I disagree. I feel that just about everything in these books belonged. The suspense got really bad a few times, and because I was reading the second one on Clive, I couldn't skip ahead without losing my place. Aargh.
There were several points where I felt like things dragged, but it was a bit like the forest part in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It just had to be there.
The most beautifully-developed theme of the story didn't become clear until the last page, even though the lead-up was all there. And then it sort of hit me in the head and left me feeling a bit desperate. Like I did when I finished the last book in the Bean series. Like I did when I finished Doomsday Book.
It's funny, because I felt like religious tone of Doomsday Book was intentionally ambiguous, as well as very satirical. It was powerful, but it left me a bit worried about the author and the characters. To Say Nothing of the Dog had no religious message whatsoever. Blackout/All Clear was different. The message was cleaner, and very sweet.
I suppose if I were to find a flaw in the writing, it's that none of the characters have any background. They all take place explicitly in the present (past?), and while they're developed well enough for action heroes, they don't have much depth beyond being intelligent, resourceful, creative, good-hearted people. This has to be a deliberate decision on the part of the author, and it does make sense. Why worry about a character's personal past when the story is about traveling back in time to do research on the past of the entire human race? They have to retain a certain Everyman quality for it to work, I guess, but I do think the characters would be more enjoyable if they had more individuality. In spite of Eileen's fascination with Agatha Christie and the fun nicknames some of the characters came up with for Polly and Mike, the only one who had a personal past was Colin, and that mostly because he was in a previous book.
Additionally, it's obvious that the main characters are just there to be juxtaposed against the "contemps". These books are more historical fiction than they are science fiction. I'm not a particular fan of either one of them as genres, but they work really well together.
Read it. But if you don't read it, at least watch High Noon. It's sort of the same. Sort of. Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly could have been the leads, at any rate. I'm sad that the movie versions of The Virginian all look so awful, particularly the most recent one from 2000. Bill Pullman would not be on my list of choices to play a mellow-voiced, tall drink of water, manly-man cowboy, and I read the synopses for three different versions. They all scramble the story around until it's unrecognizable.
But the real story was therapy for a wounded soul after having read a terrible, terrible book club pick.
What does it say about me that the Virginian trumps Captain America, if only slightly, as an archetype? I am proud to announce it means that I'm a lot more like my Mama than I ever thought. I may have certain derogatory opinions about John Wayne's acting ability, and I may never be able to sit through an episode of Gun Smoke without my eyes and ears bleeding, but I actually do love Westerns. The good ones. Peace Like a River? Loved it so much I bought like 6 copies just to give away to people and share the love. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Silverado? I challenge you to a quote war. I even liked the remake of True Grit (minus that one part ... you know what I'm talking about). Add The Virginian to my list.
One day I was walking down an interstate. There were lots of people, and I was pretty confused. I saw a bridge with some of the railing broken off, and below it was a very large lake, in which a multitude of kids were noisily splashing around. It looked kind of like swimming lessons, so I jumped in.
But pretty quickly I realized that the splashing around wasn't playing or swimming. Off to the side there was someone working with a group of them on synchronized swimming and water aerobics, but most of the kids were drowning, having been crammed into a bus driven by a drunk driver that sent it flying off the bridge and crashing into the water before I got there. My first instinct was to drag all the kids out of the water so they wouldn't drown.
Some people yelled at me to teach them to swim, but I looked down and saw that someone had tied my hands behind my back. The best I could do was bob around, gasping for air when I surfaced, and hold my breath when I was under the water line. Most of the kids were in a similar situation. Some of them knew how to swim, so they were okay, but there were a lot of them stuck in water too deep for their heads to surface.
I asked the people standing on the edge of the water—they must have been lifeguards—if they could help, or at least untie my hands. They told me all I had to do was teach the kids how to breathe underwater and everything would be fine.
Yeah. That's what it felt like.
In spite of the media claim that teachers are leaving the profession in droves, I haven't seen much of that. The only other former teachers I know are the ones who got advanced degrees and went into academia--and they are still teachers dealing with offshoots of the same issues.
Maybe it's true that all those "veteran" teachers are more altruistic than I am. Maybe they really do care more about the kids of America's future. Maybe I just wasn't strong enough to persevere in a good cause. Maybe I have a martyr complex and felt more responsibility than I should have. I am idealistic, but I'm not an idealogue, and I don't find fulfillment in devoting myself to causes in which I am given accountability disproportionate to my authority. It was four years I will never get back, and while I don't regret it, I can't do it again. I'm glad I did it because I learned so much, and I really hope that I was a positive influence on my kids as well. I sure did try to be. I'm even more glad that I was blessed to be able to change careers, and that I can go to work and live my life without that crushing, demoralizing anxiety and guilt I used to feel every day.
I just finished reading When We Were Orphans. It was a trip. I really do enjoy the whole unreliable narrator thing, especially when said narrator isn't too far off base. I've experienced the Roger Ackroyd effect, as well as The Sound and the Fury, and it's unsettling to be put inside the mind of murderers and the mentally handicapped. I think it just might be more unsettling to be put inside the mind of someone who is sometimes insane and sometimes not; someone who is so haunted by his past that he mixes things up to the point that you really think he's dangerous.
The narrative centers around the investigation Christopher Banks, a young English gentleman, is putting together to find his parents, who mysteriously disappeared when they all lived in Shanghai, when he was nine or ten years old. When it became clear that his parents were not coming back, officials sent Christopher to England, but he grew up believing that if he could become a brilliant enough detective, he could figure out what happened and save his parents from captivity, and at the same time fix the mess China was in at the time (the fight between Chiang Kai-shek and the communists, and the invasion from Japan). At the same time, he mixes up his memories of the events surrounding his parents' disappearance with some confusing things going on with his best friend. His half-hearted love affair with a London friend, Sarah Cummings, and his adoption of an orphan named Jennifer deepen the theme of the lost, confused child who can never manage to pick up the pieces of the past.
The most striking thing about the story is the obvious portrayal of the incompleteness of a child's comprehension. Our perceptions of the world are shaped during childhood, and misconceptions become hard-wired. I find myself remembering very small things that happened when I was little, that have had a deep and lasting impact on my life. It only makes sense that something as big as having one's parents disappear, and subsequently being sent to a boarding school on the other side of the world, could be unsettling enough to send one very near the edge of insanity, where all it takes is a little trip into a war zone to tip the scales.
It wasn't as depressing as I make it sound. There is some resolution, though not the sort to make for a happy ending. And I would never, ever attempt to make it into a movie. Certain scenes would be too gruesome. The book is finely written, and I would recommend it (not for everyone, of course) but I will never read it again.
So I watched a spider roam around my kitchen during General Conference a little over a week ago, and while I kicked the caterpillar out of the dining room, I left him outside the patio and wished him well. Beetles are left to bumble undeterred. But.
Roaches are not welcome. They are specifically excluded from the equal opportunity policy. Period. It must have thought it could get away with loitering in my lavender and tea-tree oil-scented home, but it thought wrong. The solution to the game: Me, in the bathroom, with the library book. I disposed of the remains rather messily, so I'm sure if someone comes to investigate they will find evidence in the form of roach guts but hopefully not smeared on the walls after I took a disinfectant wipe to them.
I had this awesome room mate one time. She asked me the day after I moved in if I liked to kill bugs. I believe the answer is now a decided no.
