He’s our son.
We received a letter last week that our son would receive a Major Award at the all-school assembly today. I joked with him that it would probably be a lamp shaped like a woman’s leg. Suspect it was just a slip of paper, though.
Two slips, as it turned out: he got the academic award for Honors Physics and Honors Spanish from last year. Only kid in each class to get it. And wouldn’t you know it? He’s a little peeved he didn’t get the award for Math Analysis.
In PE yesterday, they played football. “It was more fun than usual,” he told me when I picked him up from school. “More running around and passing, not as much blocking. But it was a funny thing.”
“What was?”
“At one point, they passed it to me. I instinctively ducked.”
He’s our son.
D.
Unsentimental
Do you want to know what to read if you’re dying to get the taste of The Lovely Bones out of your mouth? (Um. What an unfortunate image.) Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, that’s what. It’s a thoroughly unsentimental look at childhood and it’s refreshing as hell after that awful Bones.
I’ll write more when I finish . . . Still barely 1/4 of the way through . . .
I opened my mouth and said something stupid today at work. I do this with fair regularity, it seems. This time I apologized at once, did some back pedaling, tried to make good. I’m already in minor hot water over another indiscretion. Hopefully this one won’t come back to haunt me.
Good thing I’m not a school teacher. Who knows what kind of trouble I’d make for myself.
D.
What it’s all about
A shout out to Daily Kos’s AverageBro, whose diary What Happens When A Liberal Black Man Goes To Glenn Beck’s “I Have A Dream, Too” Speech?!? is definitely worth a read. One money quote:
I didn’t know any of the black folks speaking onstage, other than Alveda King. There was some preacher who did his best King impersonation. A gospel choir that sang “Lift Every Voice And Sing” to a crowd that had no idea what the song was. King did her usual “token black Conservative” spiel, dropping a million and one references to an uncle she didn’t even really remember. You know what, I Have A Dream, myself: I want Alveda King to get a real day job and quit exploiting her last name for personal gain.
And a great photo he took of one of the tee-shirts on sale:
Close with another money quote.
The speeches were boring, purposely scaled back in tone to avoid criticism, and mindlessly generic. Any 8th grader with a 4th Of July Madlibs book could have written today’s script.
D.
My little library is taking shape
I’ve been working at converting our spare bedroom into a library/guest bedroom. It used to be a pink-striped nightmare (a little girl’s room, for parents who see their daughter as a little princess, no doubt), but we got it painted. Last weekend I assembled the bookshelves, and this last week we had a new ceiling fan installed. Nice dark blades instead of those peppy white blades. I bought a rug, too. It’s all coming together.
Today, we took delivery on more furniture: an easy chair and sofa bed. Sadly, the sofa bed would not fit through the door, even after we took the door off its hinges and took the legs off the sofa bed. My bad for not measuring the doorway and the sofa bed. I don’t think about such things. I really don’t. I guess I imagined that such things are standard, that no one would create a sofa bed that couldn’t fit through a doorway.
And so we left the sofa bed in the living room, which is making the cats very happy (much softer for their tushes than the black vinyl sofa we’ve owned since my residency). The black sofa is in the bedroom, which is less than ideal since it’s not a sofa BED.
Tonight, I unloaded five boxes of books, which is about 1/3 of what I need to unload. I’ve unloaded my Gaiman and my Burroughs and my Conrad. My Dick is still in the garage. (Philip K Dick, that is.) I unloaded my Shakespeare and my Shaw. My Martin Cruz Smith and my Crumley and my Goodis. Oh, and I discovered that I must have gone through one hell of a Roald Dahl phase, because we own a LOT of Dahl.
And then there are all those math, physics, and chemistry textbooks which will go to waste if Jake decides to become a botanist or a history major. Karen has some pretty heavy duty shit, I’m telling you. Complex analysis, exotic algebras for quantum mechanics. They’re the kind of books that don’t go bad, but I suspect they’re too high level even for our local Cal State library.
Yes, I should donate more of my books. It’s bizarre, really, even a little crazy to want to hang onto books I’ve read but have no intention of reading again, all because I liked them so much the first or second or third time through. I guess there’s no predicting what I might yet decide to re-read, but still . . . it’s nuts. I think I’ll go through the lot of them yet again, next time we move. Whenever that is.
Still to come: we need a little table next to the easy chair, and a reading light to go atop it.
D.
That does it. No more best sellers.
I finished Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones today. And oh, my.
Here’s the premise: 14-year-old Susie Salmon is raped, killed, and dismembered by a neighbor. She narrates the novel from “her heaven,” wherein she is perpetually 14, perpetually on her way to high school. Susie is, to put it mildly, obsessed with the living; although there are hints that others in her shoes eventually move on to a better place, she is content to haunt the living — her father, mother, siblings, the boy she had just kissed, the girl who brushed against Susie’s soul in its fevered rush from Earth, and even her murderer.
What The Lovely Bones does well is detail the way violent crime warps and devastates the lives of those close to the victim; Sebold also does a nice job showing that not all changes wrought by such a horror are bad. If Sebold had been content to leave these as her sole themes, if she had written a Susie-free novel, this would have been a fine book. Instead, we have a novel that can’t make up its mind between first person narration and omniscient POV. Because, yes, Susie is terribly omniscient, delving into her various subjects’ hearts and minds, their fears and desires, their most buried memories.
And yet we only occasionally see Susie’s reaction to what she witnesses. It’s so rare that when it happens, it stands out. To me, Susie eventually seemed less and less a character, more and more a manifestation of Sebold herself.
Spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.
Back to school night
Tonight was Jake’s Back to School Night. We went last year, but I mistakenly brought Jake along with me. When we realized our mistake, we left after The Pitch. Didn’t seem fair to make him be the only kid sitting in a room full of parents.
The Pitch: they start every Back to School Night with a plea . . . with several pleas. Pleas for volunteers. Pleas for more money over and above the tuition (it’s a private Catholic school, for those of you just tuning in). Pleas for recruitment of more students. I don’t mind this, since it’s all about survival. Or at least I wouldn’t mind it if the room weren’t in the 80s.
And that’s with air conditioning. Outside it was well over 110. They had watering stations and ice cream, and they told everyone to go to the library if they got too overheated, since it’s the best air conditioned building on campus. But we still were supposed to crisscross the campus, going from one classroom to the next, following in miniature our child’s typical school day.
My impressions thus far:
I like Jake’s calculus teacher. I’m reserving judgment about the rest.
I’m reminded of the fact that educators must double as entertainers and stand-up comics (am I right, Sis?) Some of Jake’s teachers Have It and some Have It Less but none was so dry as to make me want to claw my eyes out and drink bleach. Which is more than I can say for some of MY high school teachers.
I really, really wanted to ask the English teacher a question. I had questions for the other teachers, too, but each “period” was the same: ten rushed minutes during which the teachers all said “email me, don’t bother calling me,” and speed-talked class expectations yatta yatta yatta.
What I wanted to ask the English teacher: You know these essays you assign wherein our child is supposed to draw from his life experiences? Well, if he hasn’t had an experience like that, can he make shit up? I keep trying to convince Jake that it’s okay to make shit up, but he hates to lie. I don’t call it lying, though. I call it comedy.
The turnout was amazing. I kept thinking, Don’t you people have lives? But then I remembered that I was there, too.
And paying for it. I have to go rehydrate. See ya.
D.
Me ‘n moo
Odd thing, but I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about my beef allergy. Probably I figured, No one wants to hear about bloody diarrhea, but you never do know what will interest some people. And one nice thing about blogging about beef allergy: it forced me to google it. I’ve asked three gastroenterologists about it (none of whom had ever heard of beef allergy) but I never googled it.
And thus I learned that it’s uncommon but not unheard of, those three gasteroenterologists notwithstanding.
Several studies reported an incidence of 1-2% of food-induced anaphylactic reactions caused by ingestion of beef. In another study an even higher figure of 9% of anaphylactic events from foods were induced by beef.
Reading about anaphylaxis from beef reminds me of my own version of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch. Throat squeezing shut and the doctor had to cut your throat with an ancient can-opener? You were lucky! While you were breathin’ easy from the rusty hole in your neck, my duodenum was trying to fling itself head-long out my ass. What beef does to me, anaphylaxis would indeed be an improvement.
Also known as SLICED DEATH.
But I wasn’t always like this. The funny thing is, I couldn’t remember when I got this way. I have memories of sharing a rib eye steak with my family — one steak would feed the three of us, sometimes with leftovers — and the occasional prime rib dinner at restaurants. Although, now that I think of it, prime rib used to make me sick even ten years ago. But no, I did okay with beef until recently. How recently?
November of 2007, when I photo-blogged farsumauro, which is if I’m not mistaken one big hunk of beef. And on 12/1/07 I made it again (according to the blog). Yet I can remember having colonic rebellions from beef while we still lived in Oregon, so that narrows it down to some time between 12/1/07 and 8/16/08*. What happened, I wonder? I often tell my older patients who kvetch things like “I never used to be allergic to” whatever, “You can develop an allergy up until the day you die.” But I never expected it to happen to me.
I don’t miss beef. I really don’t. Turkey burgers are surprisingly good substitutes, as is a nice meat sauce for pasta made from ground pork or ground turkey. Know what I do miss sometimes? A Thai beef salad. But it’s not a big deal for me, just something I’d eat if I could eat beef again.
Memory’s an odd thing, though, because for the longest time I told myself that this must have been caused by the Atkin’s diet. But I stopped doing Atkin’s way back in ’03 or ’04, so that’s not to blame.
It just happened. And I developed a lactose intolerance about the same time, too. You’d think with all those convenient allergies I would be forced to eat a healthy diet, wouldn’t you? And yet I still manage to find ways of abusing my body. Humans are creative that way.
D.
And now I’m reading . . .
I feel like such a lemming: I’m reading Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Lemming because for a time, it seemed like everyone around me was toting this book.
I think I like it, but I’m not sure. It’s awfully manipulative at times. I feel like I’m reading the treatment for an old Steven Spielberg movie. (And sure enough, Spielberg executive produced the movie version of The Lovely Bones!) And somehow it doesn’t seem fair, selecting such charged subject material for the plot.
Eh, that’s all I got. Except for this.
D.
Slick
It’s been a while since I’ve written. Really written. I did put out a little over 1200 words last Saturday, but the writing was pedestrian and reminded me of nothing so much as the stuff I cranked out back in 2001, when I first started. And even that was exceptional, since it’s 1200 words more than I’ve written on any given day for the last two years.
But I can still appreciate slick writing — at least I have that.
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead: This is the book I turned to after finishing Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — which was a fine read, but ultimately not very meaty. Rebecca Stead’s novel, on the other hand, has a similarly light touch, yet manages to weave a number of themes: the odd nature of childhood friendships, which can at once be superficial and miles-deep; the seemingly random cruelty of kids; the complexity of parent-child relationships. There’s even a little racism and class warfare stirred in, all in one skinny novel about time travel, The $10,000 Pyramid, and growing up in the 70s in New York City.
Miranda is a 12-year-old whose best friend Sal stops hanging out with her soon after he’s punched in the face and stomach by another kid. It’s easy for the reader to concoct theories to fit the data; perhaps Miranda reminds Sal of his humiliation, and that’s why he can’t tolerate her presence anymore? But this is a novel where little is as it seems, and while everything has a reason, the reader’s patience is rewarded only near the story’s end.
Soon after the punching incident, Miranda begins finding notes that are vaguely creepy and hint at a foreknowledge of the future. That the notes do, in a way, come from the future is hardly a spoiler; Miranda’s favorite book is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, and she and the other kids in the story expend some effort wrapping their heads around time travel concepts. The identity and purpose of the messenger is the true mystery, and for that we readers (and Miranda) must wait for the story to unfold.
Meanwhile, we’re treated to a realistic look at what it was like to be a grade-schooler in New York City in the late 70s, and yet this is not filler. What happens between Miranda and her friends is critical to the denouement.
And that’s all the review you get ‘cuz my brain is still not working well from the insomnia. It’s tough functioning on an average of four hours a night.
D.
High concept game review from BoingBoing
Just brilliant: Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein got three real-life yakuza to review the Sega USA game Yakuza 3.
I enlist the aid of a teenager to show the yaks how to actually play a videogame. Even then, it’s tough going. Of the three reviewers, only Kuroishi manages to play it all the way to the end. Two of the three are missing their pinkies — in the old days, when a yakuza or his subordinates screwed up, they chopped off pinkies as an act of atonement — and this seems to affect their gameplay.
Hey, Mr. Adelstein: Mafia II is coming out soon. Do ya think . . . ?
D.