dusty kid.

We stopped in our tracks when the chicken exploded.

"You're not allowed to say I don't know how to use the microwave anymore."

Josh does not know how to use the microwave, or at least he did not until very recently.  That was when I noticed that his strategy was to always set the timer for five minutes and then wait until he heard the tell-tale pop and sizzle.  When confronted with numbers, Josh takes a guess and hopes for the best.  Since I started teasing him about his microwaving skills, he has figured out that he can stop and think for half a second and come up with a more reasonable guess than five minutes.

I opened the microwave and began cleaning out the shredded chicken pieces decorating each of the six interior sides.  Remix, always on hand when something is happening in the kitchen, watched with interest.  I told her to sit, then tossed a handful of irradiated chicken at her feet.

I could not understand why the chicken exploded.  I'd set the timer for forty-five seconds, and there were three leftover fried tenderloins in there, fresh from the fridge.  That should not explode anything.  But I shrugged and put the plate of chicken in the oven to broil.  Then I put in a bowl of green beans into the microwave, thirty seconds.  Within five seconds, there was the pop and sizzle and a trail of smoke was emitting from one bean.  Then the microwave's hum changed slightly and there was no more pop and sizzle.  Another five seconds, the hum changed back to the other hum, and the trail of smoke got bigger.  I stopped before I ended up wiping exploded bean.

I was encouraged by the partial behavior.  A microwave that is sorta broken still sorta works.  Maybe we'll reheat the spaghetti sauce on the stove for tonight, but tomorrow, we could give our old machine another try.  It just needed a rest.  That sounds logical, right?  Josh said that a sorta broken microwave was dangerous, and we were all going to get cancer immediately.

Our microwave, like our late heat pump, is original to the house, which means it has given 29 years of service.  Maybe it was time to let it go.  In any case, my beans were still cold.

"I have a microwave in my car," Trevor said.

"Huh?"

Trevor has a microwave in his car.  Formerly, it lived in his dad's basement before moving with Trevor to his first apartment.  After the apartment, he moved in with someone who had a better microwave, and his basement microwave stayed in the car.

That was about eight years ago.  The one time the microwave left the car was when Trevor got a new car, where the microwave went to live.

"I just thought it might come in handy someday."

He went to go digging in his car, which I began to think of as some kind of Mary Poppins vehicle.  Who knows what else might be in there?  He came back inside carrying a GE Turntable Microwave Oven.  Josh got a wet rag and began wiping years of backseat off the little machine.  It was gross.  Somewhere in the conversation, we ended up naming the microwave "Dusty Kid."  Sometimes we name our appliances and refer to them as robots.

"You know, I think I would have plugged it in and tried it out to see if it worked, then spent the time cleaning it," Trevor remarked.  That would have been smarter.  But it didn't matter, because we plugged in Dusty Kid (the light came on!), and gave him a bowl of mostly cold beans.  With the push of a button, he hummed to life.  Thirty seconds later, warm beans.

"See, I knew it would come in handy someday."

changing tables.

A couple of years ago, when we were visiting Josh's mom, I was walking around the house with her and she was just offering me furniture left and right. It was in a Someday kind of way. I think it started when I complimented the hall tree, and she said that maybe Someday, once we got settled, we could have it. Then later, it was a pair of bunk beds. You know, once we get settled. Once we had four children, apparently. It felt a little like a bribe.

Not that I have any problems with bribes, according to my new kitchen table.

Josh asked for this table when he was twelve years old. You know twelve year old boys, always wanting furniture. This was their family dining room table, where five little boys made suppertime messes and did their homework. It was made by a woodworking neighbor out of a humongous maple tree that used to grow on the old family land. There is a little gold plaque on the base, saying the name of the carpenter and the date. The table was made in 1989. My sweet Joshua was six years old.

Pretty sweet heirloom, right? I know! My advice to you ladies out there who like nice furniture: marry a first-born. His grandbaby-hungry parents will just throw furniture at you.

We picked up the new table using the band van, because a farmhouse table is one of the few things that will not go inside a Honda Fit. When we turned it over on its side to fit it throw the doorway, we discovered ancient food stains decorating the underside. Josh said, "You can see the marks from Andrew's high chair." Andrew, nearly seventeen years old and holding up one side of the table, looked a little embarrassed.

For now, my house has two tables. I bought my dinette set (table including a leaf, 6 chairs) at a yard sale more than ten years ago. I am a sucker for a vintage dinette set. This one came along at just the right time. I was just about to move into my first apartment, and I had no furniture. The yard sale was at a church, with assorted items spread out on a basketball court next to a picnic shelter. We got there early in the day, and the table and chairs was $30. I was all ready with my cash in hand, but my boyfriend told me to wait until the end of the day. We came back later and got it for $15, because I guess no one else in Connolly Springs appreciates vintage tables. The set was already a little world-weary from half a century of service, but a couple of years in my college apartment did it no favors. It seems like every time I change residences, the legs come off in the move. We ended up having to attach the legs to pieces of wood that we then reattached to the table. Even still, I wouldn't trust my weight on it.

The night we got the new table in the house, Josh laid himself right on top of it. Maple is strong.

Of course I am a little sad to be saying goodbye to my lovely dinette, rescued from the trash heap in a community where retro furniture is not as appreciated as it should be. I mean, you would be surprised if I did not mourn a crappy, barely-standing table. You would begin to seriously question my devotion to junk. But we already have a home for it, in the house of a friend who also does not let a couple of wobbly legs get in the way of appreciating something with a history. Being able to give something away, rather than merely getting rid of it, always soothes the pain of letting go.

Besides, I think it's getting to be time in my life where I could use a sturdy table. Buying secondhand does not mean all your belongings are junk. It means that you use what works until you find something better within your means - the continuous upgrade. I had a high school teacher who talked about every change in our lives as if it were a death. This is the death of my vintage dinette set self, the birth of my heirloom table self.

Surveying our downstairs this week, Josh remarked that he finally felt that the house was his. While I think the getting married probably had a little to do with it, I have to agree that his presence is more obvious. He went around pointing out all the things that came from him: a sarcophagus, an electric organ, and a great big table, the table from his childhood. I pointed out that all these things were half mine now.

gone for the summer.

We have a stone fireplace, which makes for a nice spot to hang some art (not in the fireplace, but on the stone, which extends all the way up to the ceiling). Occupying that spot for a while now is a print of a painting of an old house in an overgrown field, called "Gone for the Summer."

I got it at a yard sale for five bucks. Five bucks! For a cool painting in an incredibly nice frame. That was the price the guy was asking, and I was happy to pay it. After I handed over the Lincoln, my mom told the guy that he was lucky I didn't try to negotiate him down.

Mothers: embarrassing their adult children since the beginning of time.

While I like this painting, I am ready to replace it. It's nice, and rundown houses in the country do hold a special place in my heart, but I would like to upgrade to something a little more...inspired. That's vague, I know, but I'll know it when I see it. We have tried to replace it with various pieces that hang elsewhere in the house, but the space requires something large.

A couple of weeks ago, Josh and I were at a Goodwill when he picked out a painting. Josh has been all about paintings lately, buying four or so in the last month. He likes real paintings, pieces of work where an actual person put an actual brush on the canvas. He hangs them in an upstairs nook where he's arranged a mini recording studio. The painting he bought that day was of a mountain scene. Great big mountains in the back, with some trees and a lake and a little cabin in the foreground. Six bucks.

When we got home, he said it was probably big enough to go up on the fireplace. And I hedged. Remember, I was ready to get rid of the old house picture. But this mountain one was not the replacement. It was fine. But it was even less inspired. The mountains especially showed some real skill with the brush, but the scene itself looked like something Bob Ross might paint. However, I took the high road and said he ought to run it up and see it how she flies.

So he did. It did not change my feelings. In fact, I thought it was even worse, because the blues and grays of the painting just sort of blended in with the blues and grays of the stone. But I said leave it up, maybe it'll grow on me. Then I went on about my day. Josh apparently continued with his admiring, because about ten minutes later, he announced, "I've decided that I like the new painting."

Isn't that cute? He decided that he liked the painting that he'd already decided he'd liked.

The other night, after more than a week of life with the mountain painting, Josh told me that he thinks the old one was better in that spot. Maybe that was hard for him to do. I like to think it was made easier by my total coolness and willingness to give the new painting a shot. I wasted no time in putting the house picture back up. We'll just keep looking.

Slightly related: When looking for a picture of the house painting, I came across a version that someone had embellished. Now that is inspired.
Credit: Lukey Arts

may 2013 books.

I wish I could say that I haven't been writing because I've been reading a bunch of books. I have read a bunch of books, but I haven't been writing for a far less noble reason: pure laziness. Anyway, on with the books! I'm still focusing on books about France or written by French people.

Scaramouche
Rafael Sabatini
Sabatini was not French, but Italian. He was a polyglot, and he chose to write in English. I wish I were a polyglot, or even a biglot. However, this book's plot is all wrapped up in the French Revolution, so it counts as part of my France reading.

The book starts up right before the revolution and follows the fortunes of one André-Louis Moreau, a godson of a local lord. His friend Philippe is a priest who believes passionately in the rights of the common man, but Moreau is unconcerned. He says that the commoners are being told to revolt by the merchants, when it is the merchants who will really benefit from the overthrow of the nobility. And even if it happened, it would be just a new set of masters.

Has it ever occurred to you, Philippe, what it is that makes the rule of the nobles so intolerable? Acquisitiveness. Acquisitiveness is the curse of mankind. And shall you expect less acquisitiveness in men who have built themselves up by acquisitiveness? Oh, I am ready to admit that the present government is execrable, unjust, tyrannical - what you will; but I beg you to look ahead, and to see that the government for which it is aimed at exchanging it may be infinitely worse.

That is a fair point, sir.

But then! Philippe is killed in a duel. And André resolves to carry on his friend's fight. He still does not believe in it, but he's a smart guy and he can talk the talk. So he goes and riles up a couple of mobs with fancy rhetoric and gets people to write some demands. As a result of being such a trouble-maker, he's wanted by the law. He goes into hiding.

I'll quit now with the plot summary, but there is swash-buckling and adventure and romance, with generous bits of philosophy mixed in. I learned a great new word: spadassinicide. It's when you provoke someone into a duel (either you insult them so they challenge you or you provoke them into insult you so you can challenge them), and then you kill them because it turns out that you're really awesome at sword-fighting and they're terrible. There was a whole series of those going on in the Senate, because all the nobility had been trained in things like fencing, while the regular folks did not have that advantage.

There is a movie, which I saw a few years back. I do not remember it very well, other than it's famous for having a really long swordfight. Based on my vague memories of it, I have to assume that the film took some liberties with the material.

Once in Europa
John Berger
This book is the second in a trilogy about French peasant life. I read the first one, Pig Earth, a while back, before I started recapping things I've read. Each book is a series of vignettes with a common theme. The stories can be a bit harsh, because it turns out that peasant life is harsh. There's a lot of birth and death, with dirt and work in the middle. In an essay about peasants, he defines them as people who are concerned only with survival, because that takes all their time and energy. I think about that definition sometimes when I get too whiny about my first world problems.

This book is about peasants moving to the city to increase their chance of survival by finding jobs. There is nothing particularly French about it. Berger lived in the French countryside, so his inspiration comes from that, but there's no reason these stories couldn't happen anywhere.

Short stories are not my favorite medium. It seems like the story ends before I can get invested in it, and then I don't spend any time thinking about what I read because I'm on to the next story (all my fault, of course). However, I did write down a quote.

"If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories. As things are here, life outstrips our vocabulary. A word is missing and so the story has to be told."

This hits on something that Josh and I talk about a lot - how the limitations of words creates the need for metaphors (or as Berger calls them, stories).

A Series of Unfortunate Events
Lemony Snicket
Covered here.

Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
This book has been everywhere, it seems. It's hot right now, I guess, which is probably how it ended up on our book club list. I'm going to spoil it, so if you want to read it, maybe skip this section. I ought to put that disclaimer up on all the books, but I guess I'm assuming you're not going out to pick up a copy of Scaramouche (though you should!).

So a dude's wife has gone missing. The first part of the book is interwoven chapters of him reacting to her disappearance and her old journal entries. The result is an interesting portrait of how miscommunication and circumstance can make a marriage go awry. It was interesting as a cautionary tale. I told Josh sadly that I was reading a book about married people who hated each other, and it was bumming me out.

However, the second part of the book just goes off the rails. It is no longer about the slow decline of a once-happy relationship, but about being married to a sociopath. And I was just not as interested in that. However, I no longer felt depressed about a broken relationship, because there are no sociopaths in my marriage, therefore this book is not applicable.

Man's Fate
Andre Malraux
I found this book in Josh's library, one more book that neither of us has ever heard of but apparently we own. We looked up Malraux, and on the basis of his Wikipedia article, I was super stoked to read his book. He sounded like a cool guy.

However, I was disappointed in the book, but I think it's probably my fault. Sometimes, when I am reading a book, I can sorta feel like I'm not getting it. I can follow the plot, but I don't necessarily get the point of the book. Nothing wrong with that, of course, not everyone will get every book right away or even ever. The thing is, I think I didn't get it because I did not read it closely and carefully enough. It's a nasty cycle where I am bored by something because I don't give it the attention it requires, and then my boredom causes me to give it even less attention. I think that's what happened here. I'm embarrassed to admit that it happens a fair amount. However, this is progress. I used to just blame it on the book.

This book is not much about France. It's about China, specifically a failed Communist revolution that happened in Shanghai in 1927. At that point, France had a little part of town that was theirs, called the French Concession. It was sort of like how Hong Kong was part of the United Kingdom before 1999. Just a little piece of France, hanging out in Shanghai. France officially gave up all its concessions in China after WWII in exchange for China pulling out of French Indochina. History is neat.

The book follows several characters who are involved with the revolution - the organizer, an arms dealer, a Russian revolutionary, and a terrorist ("The sons of torture victims make good terrorists." Yeesh.). The title, Man's Fate, refers to death, which Malraux equates with man's dignity. The people's oppressors have taken away their ability to live with dignity, and so their only way to regain it is to die. Each character is fighting something different, even as they are on the same side - the organizer is fighting for the idea of Communism, while the revolutionary is fighting for the actual workers. The terrorist is fighting against the oppressors. These characters face their mortality by trying to make their lives (and deaths) count. However, the arms dealer has no cause greater than himself. He likes to drink and gamble and he sells things to facilitate his lifestyle. And...he survives, while the other characters die in various awful ways (cyanide, boiled alive, and blown up, respectively).

See, now that I've thought it out, I wish I'd paid more attention when reading it. Someday I'll be good at this.

Candide
Voltaire
There is a reason that this book is considered one of the best ever. After the apocalypse, when all the copies of Gone Girl have been destroyed and no one's Kindles work anymore, someone will still have a copy of Candide.

This book is terrificially funny and absolutely horrifying. It pokes fun at lots of things (religion, the government, the military, etc), but one target in particular is optimism, the idea that ours is the best of all possible worlds. This idea came from Leibniz (better known to me for independently inventing calculus), who used it to solve the problem of evil in a world created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent God (an attempt to solve this problem is known as a theodicy, a word coined by Leibniz). This answer does not sit well with Voltaire, who noticed that if this is the best of all possible worlds, it still sucks a lot of the time. So you have a few characters traipsing through life and really, really, really awful things happen to them. Here's a sample of the awfulness: forced enscription, flogging, war, rape to the point of disembowelment, syphilis, shipwreck, earthquake, tsunami, fire, the Inquisition, torture, being sold into slavery, having a butt cheek cut off to so someone else can eat it...

I'll stop. That is just the first third of the book. I'm sorry that you had to read about all those awful things, but it was Voltaire's fault. Everything is told very matter of factly, as if he were describing a stroll in the woods instead of a life of terribleness. At the end, our hero gives up his philosophy of optimism and takes up gardening, concluding that the world is an awful place and the best you can do is work hard on your own little piece of it.

Despite all the doom and gloom, this really is a marvelous book. The style is similar to Gulliver's Travels - short chapters where the characters have various adventures in far-off lands. And it is really very funny. There's a great scene where Candide is in South America, has killed a priest, and taken his robes. He gets captured by some natives, who are planning on eating him because the missions have been exploiting the locals rather than helping them ("Let us eat a Jesuit!"). But then he tells them he's not a priest, he's just killed one and taken his robes. So he doesn't get eaten, and they all celebrate together.

Well, I thought it was funny.

Claudine at School
Colette
This book is the first in a series of Claudine books. Her further adventures, judging by the titles, include going to Paris and getting married and having a friend named Annie. This installment has her telling about her last year in school. She lives in the countryside with her loving, but distracted father who studies mollusks. At fifteen, she straddles the lines between sophisticated and crude, worldly and naive, woman and child. Everyone in the town thinks she is crazy, but mostly it seems like she just doesn't give a crap what the rest of them think. The stories are simple and provincial, the major events being local doings like final exams and a visit from a government minister.

It sounds like a nice little book, right? Like a French cousin of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or something.

Well, it's not quite. There is kind of a lot of lesbian stuff in this book. At first, when Claudine is developing a close friendship with a young female schoolteacher, I just figured all the breathless compliments and hugging and kissing were, I dunno, French or something. But then a couple female schoolteachers start all the hugging and kissing, and later we discover that they share a bed. The book is not erotic or anything, but I was mildly shocked. I think the French reading public of 1900 was, too.

I am not sure if I'm going to explain this very well, but I noticed a difference in the treatment of the relationship in the book and how such a relationship is commonly seen now. Now, we would see two women being together, and say, oh, they're gay, because gay is now an identity that you can claim. You can be gay without even ever having had a same-sex relationship. This was more like a relationship without the identity. There was never an indication that anyone saw these women as being somehow different from other people for being in a same-sex relationship. They just happened to sleep together for now and would probably go off and marry men someday (since there were not a whole lot of options for women anyway). There wasn't a concept of being gay, even if people were doing things that we would say indicated they were gay now. There were no homosexuals (people attracted to the same sex), just homosexual acts (you know). I think there are people who still see it that way now. Some industrious soul has probably already traced the concept of gayness throughout history.

I don't know if that made any sense at all. Anyway.

It's not all scandals, and even the teachers' relationship is told more like gossip (it seems more scandalous that they are open about it, rather than the fact that it happens at all). Claudine makes a charming narrator, quick-witted and daring. My favorite scene may be where she gets bored waiting for a final exam to start and goes and falls asleep in an abandoned courtyard. She comes to the exam late, with twigs in her hair. Oh, that Claudine.

Claudine at School is the first book written by Colette, though it was published under her first husband's name. The books are thought to be autobiographical. My familiarity with her other work extends as far as the movie Gigi, which was also charming and mildly scandalous. I enjoyed reading this book, and I have all four Claudine books in one volume, so I will probably read those, too.

tridecalogy.

I've had the whole thirteen book set (a tridecalogy!) of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events for a while now. The dark secret was that I'd only read six of them. Nothing makes me feel more like a phony than owning books I haven't read, though I at least had the decency to move them to a shelf upstairs, rather than display them openly, where someone might ask and I'd have to come clean. Being written for children, the books are not difficult, and though each is 200+ pages, between the big print and the widely-spaced lines, it didn't take me long to finish each one.

The premise is that a trio of young siblings, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, having been orphaned by a terrible fire, are taken to live with a guardian. However, they are pursued by the dastardly Count Olaf, who wants nothing more than to get his hands on the children's inheritance. Count Olaf and his vile associates concoct various nefarious schemes to do away with the guardians, who are frequently incompetent or spineless, if not outright evil.

The first six books are pretty formulaic. The orphans get a new guardian. Count Olaf shows up in a disguise that is transparent to the children, but manages to fool all the useless adults who are supposed to protect the children. The children uncover his devious and usually ridiculous scheme, and use their intelligence and resourcefulness to thwart him. Count Olaf gets away to do evil some other day. The end.

The writing style is the real hook here. The author tells you repeatedly that this is really such an awful story and he encourages you to put down the book immediately to read something more pleasant. The back cover of each book is a letter from Snicket to any prospective readers, telling them why they do not want to read the book. The guy is not afraid to take a gimmick to the extreme. For example, in Book 11 (The Grim Grotto), Snicket spends multiple pages describing the water cycle, so as to bore the reader into sleep so that he will not have to read the terrible things that happened to the Baudelaires.

These are books for book nerds; in fact, a oft-repeated idea is that well-read people are less likely to be evil. There are jokes embedded in the text for careful readers.

The book was long, and difficult to read, and Klaus became more and more tired as the night wore on. Occasionally his eyes would close. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over.

And there are general word jokes. Snicket will use a word, then define it for this very specific context. He will also explain common turns of phrase, so that he can then use it in the course of the book, sometimes in very literal ways. The result is very clever, funny, and frequently absurd.

At this point in the dreadful story I am writing, I must interrupt for a moment and describe something that happened to a good friend of mine named Mr. Sirin. Mr. Sirin was a lepidopterist, a word which usually means "a person who studies butterflies." In this case, however, the word "lepidopterist" means "a man who was being pursued by angry government officials," and on the night I am telling you about they were right on his heels. Mr. Sirin looked back to see how close they were--four officers in their bright-pink uniforms, with small flashlights in their left hands and large nets in their right--and realized that in a moment they would catch up, and arrest him and his six favorite butterflies, which were frantically flapping alongside him. Mr. Sirin did not care much if he was captured--he had been in prison four and a half times over the course of his long and complicated life--but he cared very much about the butterflies. He realized that these six delicate insects would undoubtedly perish in bug prison, where poisonous spiders, stinging bees, and other criminals would rip them to shreds. So, as the secret police closed in, Mr. Sirin opened his mouth as wide as he could and swallowed all six butterflies whole, quickly placing them in the dark but safe confines of his empty stomach. It was not a pleasant feeling to have these six insects living inside him, but Mr. Sirin kept them there for three years, eating only the lightest foods served in prison so as not to crush the insects with a clump of broccoli or a baked potato. When his prison sentence was over, Mr. Sirin burped up the grateful butterflies and resumed his lepidoptery work in a community that was much more friendly to scientists and their specimens.

At which point, he goes on to explain the figurative use of the phrase "butterflies in your stomach."

For all the humor, the subject-matter is dark, dark, dark. I mean, we are starting off with some kids whose idyllic lives have come to an end with the untimely death of their parents, and there is a lot of fire and death to follow. Plus, there is the fact that pretty much every single adult in these books is useless. There are the bad guys, and then there are the well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual guys. The children are repeatedly let down by people that they should be able to rely on for help or protection. In fact, each book seems to illustrate a new way in which other people can let us down.

During the seventh book, the formula breaks. I suppose Mr. Snicket got tired of it. I admit that I was a little tired of it, too. Before Book 7 (The Vile Village), I was determined to make it all the way to the end of the series, at which point I could turn them all into the used book store for credit to buy some other series of children's books that I might enjoy more. But as I continued, I started to think I might be keeping a spot for these on my shelf. And by the time I finished, I was convinced that these books were something amazing and wonderful.

Here, I will take a moment to differentiate between Lemony Snicket and Daniel Handler. Lemony Snicket is the pen name of Daniel Handler. However, sometime after Mr. Handler got bored with writing the same book, one of the ways he changed it up was to make Mr. Snicket a character in the books. From the beginning, Snicket is the storyteller, someone who exists in the same world as the characters and knows about them and is conveying to us what happened. He occasionally talks about himself, such as when he told the story about his friend the lepidopterist. However, at some point, Snicket becomes a character in the story he is writing. He is never an actor in this particular story, the story of the orphans, but he plays in other stories of the world that share many of the same characters.

So after the formula breaks, we start to see some other themes in the books, other than reading is awesome and sometimes grown-ups suck. And I was impressed at the complexity of the ideas being conveyed in these children's books. In Book 10 (The Slippery Slope), the children learn that when fighting evil, you have to be careful not to become evil yourself. Then in Book 11 (The Grim Grotto), they come to the realization that everyone is partly noble and partly wicked, rather than the world being simply divided into good guys and bad guys.

People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

They later realize this lesson applies not only to themselves, but to their dead parents and the villainous Count Olaf as well.

The last book is very strange, and it's a pretty strange series to begin with. The children manage to escape Count Olaf's clutches for the last time and find a place where they can be safe from the treachery of the world, where the final lesson they learn is that there is no place that is safe from the treachery of the world. And then the story just ends, after a long discourse about beginnings and endings and how you can never know the whole story. The last book was simply magnificent. I was glad that I'd made the commitment to read them all because the payoff was so great.

I have no idea how an actual kid might react to these books. The reading level remains simple, and all the difficult words are explained, but the themes are big. A kid could probably still enjoy reading the books without completely understanding everything, and I don't have a problem with exposing children to big ideas through stories about guys named Count Olaf. That's why we have stories - to enable us to understand life's difficult lessons.

*Note: There is a movie that tells the basic story of the first three books. I haven't seen it in a while, but I recall the tone as being fairly faithful, but ultimately it was a failure. The pacing was frantic, and so much of the enjoyment of the books comes from the word humor, which would be hard to do in a movie in any case.

may showers.

The lady next to me was talking about great it was that they finally had places in Clayton where you could host a nice event like a baby shower. I nodded and smiled, since I don't live in Clayton, nor do I end up hosting very many nice events. She asked me how I knew the new mother, and I said I'd met her at Governor's School. The lady was familiar with Governor's School, and she remarked how she was glad that they'd gotten their state funding back. The woman on the other side of me asked if I knew a friend of hers who had gone the same year as I went. She described him to me, and I smiled and shook my head, explaining that there were 400 kids there and it happened thirteen years ago. She nodded, then told me that he had a goatee.

Thankfully, we played a nursery rhyme game next. And then there was food. Someone mentioned that the baby's father was down the street at a coffee shop (good for you, Clayton), along with a couple of other husbands. And then someone else said that it had been a while since she'd gone to a ladies only shower, and most of the ones she'd been to lately had been co-ed. I was agog. I had never been to a co-ed shower, unless you count the ones that occurred at church, where the men sat off to the side after the potluck and ignored all the actual shower activity. Does having men there make it better? Or are we just dragging them into the misery, ha ha ha, now you sit here and admire a series of blankets, oh aren't they soft. I would have added alcohol before I added men.

A pair of helpers lined up the gifts next to where the mother-to-be was sitting. Aside from being seventh months pregnant, she also had recently broken her ankle, which is some combination of misery that I cannot even imagine. I think I'd be pretty whiny if it were me. My gift bag, sparkly where all the others were soothing, sat at the very end of the queue, right before the grand finale in a giant box wrapped with paper covered with baby monkeys. (Spoiler alert: It was a pack n' play).

As the parade of presents began, a feeling of dread began growing somewhere near where my chicken salad croissant was mingling with a rosemary pear scone. Each package revealed onesies, bottles, diapers, receiving blankets, etc. I was shocked to realize that everyone had given her stuff that was, you know, baby stuff. Everyone cooed at the cuteness and the softness of it all, while I wondered if I could sneak out before she got to my present.

So. You're probably not surprised to find that I did not consult the registry when shopping for this shower. I didn't even look at it, though I did buy a gift card to a store where she was registered. But that was the end of my attempt to follow the rules. Instead, I'm afraid that I went shopping in my house. In the sparkly bag were four things:

• The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook - I'd recently found a hardback copy, so this was my old copy, which my friend had admired. She collects cookbooks, and this one is especially fun.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - in one volume, with the original illustrations and everything. A very nice book. Turns out we had four copies of it in the house, and I figured everyone likes Alice. She had already received a copy of some kind of version for babies, which basically consisted of pictures illustrating colors (white rabbit, black shoes, etc). The person who gave it to her made sure to point out that it was not the scary version, by which she meant the actual children's classic.
• A Wand - bought at an estate sale a couple years ago, this was an officially licensed Harry Potter product. It came in a beautiful box, wrapped with maroon gossamer and set in velvet. Okay, sure, it is just a knobby stick. But when my friend told me she was pregnant, she said it was due at the end of July and referenced the prophecy in the books about the son born in the close of the seventh month. If you don't want dorky gifts, don't make dorky jokes, I guess.
• A card - signed by both me and Josh. In fact, Josh wrote a poem. A few weeks ago, we had our first big married fight about writing thank you cards. He said he would do some, and then he just never did, and I kinda lost my cool about it. But the morning before the shower, I handed him the card and told him to write them something, like ready set POEM, and he just did it. Lesson learned, I guess. ANYWAY, the card was very nice and it contained the aforementioned gift card.

My ability to gauge this stuff is way off, but it truly did not occur to me that our gift was unorthodox until I sat through all the orthodoxy. I give used gifts all the time, and yes, some of the things I give away were things that were technically mine. I did not buy them for the purpose of giving them to the specific recipient, though I may have bought it because I figured that someone would want it someday, and on that day, I would be prepared. But sometimes, I bought them for me, but later decided I no longer needed. That doesn't mean they're not awesome, right?

No, it was fine. People were intrigued and amused when my gifts were held up for public viewing, and I think I managed to play it like I had not belatedly realized giving a pointed stick to an unborn child was in any way inappropriate. If you are going to buck social mores, you really have to own it. And my friend, the only one who really matters, understands me and Josh and would not want us to be any other way.

And actually, it was a lovely shower. Social occasions just make me grumpy. The food was very good, and the shop, right there in Clayton, was quite nice. The whole shindig was a group effort, put forth by various female family members. It is obvious that this baby is going to be surrounded by love, and as long as someone keeps the wand away from him until he's older, he'll probably turn out fine.

get crafty.

It was a lovely Saturday afternoon when I arrived at the Rowan County Public Library in downtown Salisbury. Outside, the community Touch-A-Truck event was just finishing up. Children walked with their parents, having fulfilled their dreams of being in contact with various trucks. Inside, one of the librarians was hosting a seminar called "Get Crafty!" about crafting with used books. You could probably guess that I was there to rip up books, rather than to touch trucks.

The librarian is a friend of mine who did me a favor and took pictures at the wedding. She thought that members of her community might be interested in making some paper flowers. After the wedding, I shipped her a box of flowers and butterflies that hadn't been taken home by guests. She set them up in the library to advertise the crafting class. People thought they were neat, and some of them came to learn, including a troop of girl scouts.

Is it just me, or is it slightly subversive for the librarian to be teaching crafts made from destroyed books?

She printed out diagrams and instructions for three different crafts: rolled roses, kusudama flowers, and birds. She provided templates, made out of a Diet Dr Pepper carton, to cut out bird parts and square pieces (for the origami). She provided a box of book and magazine pages, sparing her patrons the task of ripping up the books themselves.

I already knew how to make the flowers, so I made a bird out of a poetry book. The body was "Fire and Ice" and the wing was a picture of Robert Frost's head. It was a little weird.

The flowers from the wedding were displayed up front, where a few older ladies discovered and admired the origami lily. Of all the flowers I managed to make, this one was the hardest. That's not to be confused with the origami daffodil, which I never managed to make at all. The librarian had not printed out instructions for the lily, because it would have gone on for pages and pages. But a pair of ambitious women found out that there was someone in the room who knew how to make them, and they descended upon me, bearing 6-inch square magazine sheets.

I was not prepared. I hadn't folded a lily in a month or so. Had you caught me during the first week of March, I could churn them out at a rate of six minutes a flower. But I remembered as I went along, each step jogging my memory for the next. I am not confident about my teaching skills, but I did my best to be patient and encouraging. This is important, since the first few you make always look a little rough. Then I let them take home the one I'd made along with each of them as I showed them the steps. One of them had a granddaughter named Lily. The other turned out to be the mayor of a tiny town down the road. They gave me their email addresses, so I could send them the link with the step-by-step instructions. We talked about different kinds of paper, and how a thicker one would probably work better for this particular flower.

The crafting event was only supposed to last until 2 pm. By 2:45, it was me and an old lady, finishing up our lilies, the girl scouts long gone. She thanked me for staying to help her, and I told her that the crafting event had been my only plan for the day. I couldn't have imagined that my day would've included teaching origami to the mayor of Granite Quarry, but life's funny like that sometimes.

entrenchment.

A friend was telling me about a recent divorce.  His ex-wife has taken up with someone else, but since he has, too, maybe that's not such a big deal.  The worst of it is she lets the new man's dog in the house.  This, after years of denying her own husband's hunting dog entrance.

To me, this sounds like entrenchment.  Maybe a long time ago, the wife legitimately did not want the dog in the house, for whatever reason.  It was a big dog, or not quite house-trained, or too rambunctious, or she grew up in a home where they did not have animals in the house.  There are good reasons for not wanting a dog in the house.  And then later, she retained her position because she had made it.  She did not start all over asking herself whether the dog could come into the house, because she'd already answered the question.  She'd said no.  Why were they even still fighting about this?

Later, after her marriage was over, a new man asked if a new dog could come into the house.  She thought about the question of a dog in the house anew, and she came to a different conclusion than before.  She didn't see why not, and it turned out to not be a problem.  Maybe she thought back and realized that she could've let her ex's dog in the house, or maybe she didn't see what one had to do with the other.

I don't know any more about this story other than wife says no to husband's dog, later says yes to a new man's dog.  Maybe there's a lot more to it.  I've never met the ex-wife, the new man, or either of the dogs.  But I am familiar with entrenchment.  I know about holding on to a position when I should've revisited my decision instead.  I know about feeling incensed that the question is even still being asked.  I know about coming to a conclusion based on an initial gut reaction and then not changing it when I have more information or experience.  I know about having the same fight over and over, even if it isn't even the same fight anymore.  I know about thinking that I know what someone is going to say and therefore not listening.

I know about being my absolute worst self around the person I love the most.

I do not know an easy way to avoid entrenchment, other than to keep trying.  Keep talking and keep listening.

may the fourth.

Thursday night, we were sitting on the sidewalk in front of a bar, waiting for the opening band to finish. Josh and his friends were writing poetry, and I was alternately reading Scaramouche and trying to take artsy pictures of our beers. Dave came out and started talking about the house party that the band was supposed to play on Saturday night. It was rumored to be ragin'.

Josh pointed out that he had to work Saturday night until 10. I listened casually, affecting disinterest and resisting the urge to yell, "What house party?" I am always the last to know. Instead, I waited until later, when I asked Josh for more information. He did not know where it was to be held, nor whether they were even playing. I guess it would be more irritating if he were withholding information from me, but it seems like he never knows what's going on either.

Saturday evening, Josh was headed to work, and he still did not know where this party was happening or whether we'd be required to go. House parties tend to get shut down, due to occupants of other houses nearby who are not interested in all the ragin'. If Josh wasn't going to get off work until 10, and city ordinances required quiet after 11, it didn't seem likely that this party was going to be in our future. But I prepared myself for either a nice evening of snuggling or for tolerating drunk people.

He called at 10:05 to tell me that he was on his way home, and then it was time to rage. As we congregated in the foyer, Trevor mentioned it was a Star Wars costume party. We looked at each other, all more appropriately attired for a Slacker Costume Party. Josh went and fetched the Storm Trooper helmet we'd bought at Goodwill and used to scare the dog. Trevor pointed out that we might not see it again, and Josh said that was the intention. Trev wondered why they were having a Star Wars party, and Josh answered that it was May 4, Star Wars Day. As in, May the Fourth be with you.

GET IT?

Josh told me I didn't have to go, and I seriously considered it. I considered it as I walked to the van, and I considered it as we drove down our street. Each moment that passed, I couldn't have told you whether or not the next moment would be the one where I told them to turn around and take me back to my pajamas and my dog and the ice cream in the freezer. As we turned onto the main road, I knew that I was committed for the evening.

The party was in south Raleigh. We had to drive through a bad neighborhood to get there, but the party area itself seemed safe. We circled the block to find parking, as both sides of the street were full. It was not hard to find the house. It was the only one that was ragin'.

As we strolled up to the porch, a Jedi and Darth Maul asked for our IDs and $8. It would have been $5 had we been wearing costumes. They said they were raising money for something, though we were never clear on what. Trevor said we were the band, and I allowed them to think that included me. Josh gave the guy working the door the Storm Trooper helmet. We all got wrist bands.

As we went into the house, the first thing I saw was a guy with a live snake around his wrist watching The Empire Strikes Back. Into the next room, where a quartet was playing some kind of drinking Battleship game made with cardboard. I couldn't see into the backyard, as the door was blocked by partygoers, and the window was blocked by an 8-foot-tall inflatable can of PBR. Finally, we made it outside, and it was a thing to behold.

To the right of the porch was a huge tent, where a band was playing. Set up next to the band was an outdoor living room - three couches set up around a hookah pipe on a coffee table. Based on the odor, the pipe was filled with tobacco, possibly strawberry flavored. Beyond that was a huge bonfire, where Ewoks and various hooded figures and about ten Han Solos stood around with red Solo cups. Then there was a trampoline, something that you should probably not have anywhere near a.) a bonfire, b.) drunk people, or c.) drunk people standing around a bonfire. To the left of the trampoline was a woman twirling fire. Next to that, there was a short bus. Inside was a sub-party, where people sat on bean bag chairs and had dance music blared at them. The bus had a platform built on top, where you could climb up and survey the party domain. You could take the ladder down, or you could slide down the pole which had been attached to a lower platform that came out from the emergency exit of the bus. Finally, there was another tent, where you could get a beer from the keg or something red called Jedi Juice.  Christmas lights were strung from tent to bus and back.

So I hadn't wanted to come, and I still didn't want to stay very long, but this here was a house party to behold. I do not understand the desire to throw a party in one's home, but I am thankful that some people do feel that desire, so that I may go to their parties if I wish.

It was 11:20, and the live music had to be done at midnight, when the DJ was scheduled to go on, because this was the kind of party where they check ID and have a band schedule. It was unclear whether the current band, who had only been playing for twenty minutes or so, would cede the stage to Josh and his bandmates. We asked Dave, who told a long story about talking to the other band about playing, the end of which was the revelation that he didn't know either. He'd gotten into the Jedi Juice. But we brought in the gear anyway, then walked around the party for a while.

Han Solo seemed to be the most popular costume choice, which makes sense because it's easy, and he's the coolest. There were Leias in every incarnation, the more bold women going with the gold bikini, of course. A few guys just wore their bathrobes, either being Jedis or Jawas or maybe just Lando on his day off. There were some scantily-clad Ewoks in Ugg boots. I did not see any Luke Skywalkers, though there was a guy who was walking around in some kind of dinosaur mascot costume. I guess when you have that kind of costume, you wear it whenever you can.

The band played. I watched and talked to some people I knew. The music stopped promptly at midnight.

As we were loading the equipment back into the van, a police car rolled up. The guys running the door ran inside to find whoever was in charge, who turned out to be Han Solo. The cop talked a while with Han and ended up giving him a warning. Han promised that the officer would not need to come back. The officer expressed his doubt.

We went back in to make our goodbyes. Return of the Jedi had just started. Lots of people clucked at us for leaving so early and accused Josh of having gotten lame since he got married. Someone enthusastically encouraged us to have some Jedi Juice. Across the yard, a woman in the outdoor living room was playing with our Storm Trooper helmet. A lot of other people were making their way out, too - between the end of the live music and the first appearance of the five-oh, I guess people were ready to move on. But as we walked down the street towards the van, a trickle of new people were coming in, carrying twelve-packs and wearing clothes that may or may not have originated in a galaxy far, far away.

We went home, ate ice cream, and watched Return of the Jedi. May the Fourth be with you.

nice lady.

I got my hair cut by a lady named Sunshine. I asked her lots of questions about it, because I'm fascinated by names. She said the biggest irritation about such a name was that people expect you to be cheerful all the time. No one is cheerful all the time.

She was cheerful enough the day I sat in her chair, though she pretended to cry about the 6 inches of my hair on the floor. I think it was for my sake, like she expected me to be sad or at least torn about chopping off so much work. I was not distraught. The last time I grew my hair long, I figured out that long hair was not my thing. But then I grew it out again for the wedding, or maybe I was just too lazy to cut it. In any case, by the end of our appointment, Sunshine was not mourning my hair anymore.

I am either a terrible customer or a great one, I can't decide. I go in there and tell them how much to cut off, but that's really my only instruction. I told Sunshine that I wanted it about shoulder-length, and then I said, "Just make it look good." I get different reactions to my lack of instructions. Some of them look stricken. But others, like Sunshine, react like they wish everyone would come in and let the experts decide.

Sunshine had very strong anti-layer feeling. I've been getting layers cut into my hair since I discovered the concept, which was probably fifteen years ago. Layers were a revelation to me. My hair is not naturally voluminous, but layers were the way to fake it. Sunshine told me she was just going to cut straight across, then launched into a not-cheerful spiel about over-layering. I was nervous about going layerless, but I decided to trust in Sunshine. Maybe it was time for a change.

The best part about going from long to short is when you run your fingers through your hair and you unexpectedly run out of hair. Ahh, much better.

That evening, I was a little ambivalent about my hair. There was nothing wrong with the cut, and I've had cuts where something was actually wrong. But somehow the style - straight cut, parted to the side - felt too no-frills. I felt certain that this haircut was giving away to the world that I no longer cared about how I looked, like I was not even trying to be attractive.

It was a married lady haircut.

That night, when Josh came home from work, he passed his husband test by noticing that I had gotten my hair cut. His next comment was that he preferred my hair long (really? First I've heard of it). But he said he didn't care what I did with my hair, as long as I "still looked like a nice lady."

A nice lady. If that isn't the unsexiest thing I've ever heard. A nice lady. Someone completely sexless and non-threatening, who might help you find the cheesecloth in the grocery store. He said "nice," but I heard "old." Turning thirty didn't bother me, but cut the layers out of my hair and I have a little crisis. Yeesh. It's a good thing I married a man who is into nice ladies.

As a note, the few times I have had to buy cheesecloth, I was able to find it at Food Lion. It was a little tricky, though, because it was on one one of those hangers that stick out in the aisles, rather than being in any particular section. You could always ask someone at the store to help you, preferably someone with a non-threatening haircut.

april 2013 books.

I read some books this month. Since we are going to France this year, I went through my giant to-read pile and picked out books set in France or written by French people. I figured this would be a good way to enrich my trip. I found that I enjoyed having a theme, as the books sometimes related to each other in unexpected ways.

Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence
MFK Fisher
Years and years ago, I read a long and flattering article about MFK Fisher, who is known primarily as a food writer. Since then, anytime I see a book by her, I pick it up. I did most of this collecting without ever having read any of her work.

This book is not about food, but some general reminiscing about her life while living in Aix. She is a good writer, but her style is a little quiet for my tastes. She paints a picture more than she tells a story. It must have been a good picture, because I did want to go to Aix. I have another of her books about living in France (in Marseille, I think), but I had to take a break from her voice for a while.

Maybe the lesson here is that I should've started reading books by the person who wrote the article about MFK Fisher. It was really good.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children
Ransom Riggs
This was the book club selection for last month, and it has nothing to do with France. I was a bad book clubber due to getting married, but since I had already bought the book, I read it.

The author collected old photographs from thrift stores and flea markets and such. He gathered a bunch of these, and then wrote a story around them. It's a cool idea, though the execution of it was a little flat for me. It is meant for young adults, so it's pretty plot-driven, and there are lots of supernatural stuff like magic powers and time travel.

The story is about a kid whose grandfather dies. Grandpa used to tell crazy stories about this orphanage where he grew up that was full of children who had special powers - levitation, invisibility, that sort of thing. The kid realizes at some point that it was all made up and he becomes disillusioned with his grandfather. Then Gramps dies and the kid is left to find out about his secret past by travelling to the orphanage.

Maybe I just haven't read a good one, but I do not find books about secret pasts very compelling. They are filled with this urgency - SECRETS! LIES! HISTORY! - but I never feel it. It mostly seems to consist of the characters running around and demanding that they have a right to know. Maybe I just cannot relate to the experience of a shocking family history. Once I found out that my mom used to own an accordian and she got rid of it, and I was kinda pissed about the accordian I could've had, but I never went on a quest to find out about my mom's lost accordian career. I did not go to Kansas music shops, slam my fist on the counter, and tell them that I had a right to know.

Does that fact that a relative did something before they were your relative mean that you have a right to know about it? I mean, curiosity is fine. But a right? Driving isn't even a right, so I don't see how knowing about your grandfather's secret past can be one.

Anyway, the book was fine. Sometimes the book club discussion changes how I feel about a book, but I guess we'll never know how I might have felt about this one.

Germinal
Émile Zola
This is the kind of book I pick up because I've heard of the author, but know nothing about him, so I assume it's important. And Zola was important. He wrote the J'Accuse! letter that appeared in the newspaper and accused the government of anti-semitism. Rather than sit down and think about what they had done, they prosecuted him for libel. Also, he wrote a whole lot of books and invented a style of literature called naturalism.

But before all that, he wrote Germinal. This book is about coal-mining! I know, aren't you excited already? Sign me up for some coal mining. French coal mining.

More generally, this book is about the inevitable conflict between Capital and Labor. It shows coal miners living in abject poverty in rented Company housing. Children work in the mines, as do young women until they are fifteen or so when they start having babies. Everyone is sick, from the combined forces of various miner's diseases and malnutrition. It's basically awful.

The Company is experiencing a downturn due to various factors (it mentions the Americans mining their own coal now), and so it is cutting corners, specifically wages. Unfortunately, the people are already starving. The miners refuse to go down into the mines at the urging of a travelling young socialist. The strike goes on and on, and both sides suffer. The Company stakeholders don't get as much money and the miners have to sell the wool in their mattresses. As this continues, formerly sensible people become warped by suffering. The miners go on a riot and vandalize a neighboring mine that belongs to a different company.

This was a great story. There were a lot of characters, and I admit to getting them mixed up from time to time (stupid French names). This is not a socialist novel per se. Your sympathy cannot help but being with the miners because of their destitution, but Zola does not take sides. It's more that you can see how each person ends up behaving the way they do, no matter what side they are on. Each plot development ends up seeming inevitable because of the characters and the situation. And there are characters on each side that represent different facets of that argument. So there is what we might call a Union man, who is in favor of strikes as a way of negotiating better conditions for the workers. Then there is a socialist, who sees the strike as the first step to the people becoming the masters. Finally, there is an anarchist, who also wants the people to become the masters, but he thinks the only way for that to happen is to burn the world down and start over. There are sympathetic characters on each side, though many of them become less sympathetic as the strike wears on and they become more entrenched in their position.

There is a lot of sex in this book. It's treated as the only way that the miners have any pleasure at all (they also drink and gamble when they can afford it). The fields around the mines are often just filled with couples canoodling in the grass. Sexual morality is not something they can afford. Their freedom is mildly shocking, though the descriptions are not graphic. Everything is treated as matter of fact, or at least matter of life. And that is naturalism!

I just want to say that I feel like a Grade A Smart Person, because I have an opinion on Zola. And all I had to do was read a 500-page novel about coal mining.

Defending Jacob
William Landay
This month's book club selection. I was not enthusiastic about reading it, and I did not enjoy it.

So, a kid is accused of murdering a classmate who used to tease him. The story is more about his parents. There was a whole tangent about the grandfather's hidden past (gah), and then it's just legal thriller until we get deus-ex-gangster. The book tries to say interesting things about parenthood, but they were not interesting enough.

At no point did I care whether the kid did it or whether he was found guilty. Needless to say, I did not care about the grandfather's hidden past.

Satori in Paris
Jack Kerouac
The neat thing about picking a wide open theme like "France" is that you can go from Zola to Kerouac.

I have mixed feelings about Kerouac. I read On the Road in my teens, because I liked the kinds of boys that like Kerouac. I related to exactly one character in the book, someone's wife who basically stood to the side, tapped her foot and looked annoyed. That was me, tapping my foot and looking annoyed at these dudes who wandered around getting drunk and acted like they were being deep. About this same time, unknown to me because he was unknown to me, Josh also read On the Road. His reaction was to decide that he wanted to go to Columbia University and then drop out, just like Kerouac! And he did! Dreams do come true.

Later, he found out that Kerouac went back to school. What else did Kerouac do? Drank for about 30 years straight and then died. Pick your mentors carefully, kids.

On the surface, the book appears to be just a retelling of Jack drinking his way around Paris and Brittany. It must have been a very expensive trip, between the booze and the replacement tickets he had to buy for the planes and trains he missed by being drunk in the middle of the day. Jack comes to a realization somewhere in the book, though he makes clear that he's not sure when it happened. He implies it has something to do with a cab driver, but his interaction with the cab driver is very limited and consists of going to the airport and drinking. He makes the flight at least. Maybe that's what was special about the cab driver. Can you hear my foot tapping?

The guy does know how to use his words. He also knows a whole heck of a lot. I would periodically get a reference, and I found them to be obscure. For instance, he talks about Judas being the one that Satan "chooses to chew," which is a reference to Dante's Inferno, where Judas is in the center of Hell, being eternally gnawed on by Satan. I appreciate the wordplay, and I felt smart for getting the reference to a classic piece of literature (an epic poem, no less), but it made me realize that the book was probably stuffed full of such allusions that I missed completely.

Josh calls this a problem of being overeducated. It's great that you are using your nice Ivy League education, but do you expect the majority of the population to read this and appreciate it? Are you writing to communicate something or just to impress us? I guess you don't have to get the references enjoy the book, and that sort of stuff is in there for the people who study literature line by line. At least, that's the most generous explanation I can come up with. My other reaction was to say "Shut up, Jack, you're not saying anything."

Josh, who has recovered from his youthful crush, says that Kerouac is better in shorter forms. He has things to say and the words to say it, but he lets himself get in the way, thus we end up with these trainwreck of thought type novels. Apparently his very short poems are the best. I can't speak for that, but after my grumpy dismissal of one of America's classics, I thought it would be nice to include the opinion of someone who gets the appeal of this guy.

I'm sorry. I don't get Kerouac. Maybe someday.

The Lily of the Valley
Honoré de Balzac
This book was terribly wordy. I know, it's a couple hundred years old and French, but reading it was sort of a slog. After I finished, though, I discovered that I liked it. The ending in particular was great and made the rest worth it.

The bulk of the book is in the form of a very long letter from Felix to his fiancee, Natalie, describing his life and loves to her. Most of it is taken up with a love affair with a Countess. He sees her at a party and is so overcome with love that he bites her on the neck. Then, he figures out who she is and shows up at her house in the country, with the aim of wooing her. They end up becoming very close friends.

The Countess, Henriette, has an awful husband. He is frequently ill with something nebulous that may not actually exist. He is supposed to run an estate, but he has no head for business. His wife basically runs the place, though she has to do it through him. He occasionally doesn't like her ideas, rants and raves about them, and then when they work, he takes credit for them. The Count will periodically scream awful things at his wife while she sits there, takes it, and works on a tapestry. Just because someone is hurling generalized insults about women at you doesn't mean you can't get a little work done.

Felix declares his love for her, but she is a virtuous woman. She really, really, really wants to drop the Count like a hat and run off with Felix, to be happy and loved, not to mentioned treated like a human being. But she stays for the sake of her children. She forces herself to think of Felix as a son, since if she allows herself to consider him as a lover, her virtue will not hold up. Felix promises to be faithful to her, even as he cannot actually have her (Spoiler alert: he breaks his promise).

I was really impressed with Balzac's ability to create such full and rounded characters, particularly Henriette. For most of the book, we are treated to Felix's perspective of her, which is adoring to the the point of being almost idolatrous. But there are a couple of letters from Henriette included, and it shows her a much more complicated person than one might suspect. Also, I was impressed with the recognition of the very frustrating position of women at the time.

Since we're talking about styles of literature, I'll mention that Balzac is considered a founder of literary realism in Europe. Zola was influenced by him!

There was a little history scattered throughout. At one point, there is a statement about the "events of the 20th of March," and I had to go look that up (Wikipedia is so awesome, because you can look up a date and see what happened on that day throughout history). I found out that March 20 is when Napoleon came back to power after exile. The characters, being part of the aristocracy, were somewhat affected by the larger goings-on in France, though I think being in the country shielded them from too much. I started reading a bit about the Revolution and then Napoleon, got confused, and decided that I needed some books with characters dealing more directly with French history. So that's coming up soon.  I know you can't wait.

shadows on the street.

Last week, a woman at work asked me what the best vintage thing I'd ever seen at a yard sale. I had no idea how to answer that. I mean, I can't even remember the things I've seen. Plus, the category of "vintage" threw me off. Vintage is cool, but it's not the only kind of thing you can find while shopping in people's yards. There's anything from antique to brand spanking new. The question comes from the mindset that the only reason to shop secondhand is to find stuff you wouldn't be able to buy new. It's more of a lifestyle choice for me. Yeah, I buy unusual and old stuff, because that stuff is there and I've got a house to fill. But I also buy skirts for church or reusable grocery bags or power tools. This is just shopping to me.

But that's alright. People going to yard sales to find crazy vintage stuff is better than them not going at all. I wish everyone had a little secondhand in their lives, whether an occasional browse through Goodwill after dropping off some donations or forgoing retail completely. I started out just shopping for novelty, and now I can't go into a regular store without complaining.

What I really want to do right now is tell you about something amazing that I bought this weekend. It's not vintage. If I had to categorize it, I would label it as foreign or art or decor.

Also, PUPPETS.

When you first look at these, they look like some kind of foreign roadside tourist art, which they probably are. They're colorful and sort of exotic and strange. But things get crazy when you get a light source involved.

SHADOW PUPPETS.  Way better than that thing your brother can do with his hands that looks sorta like a rabbit.

I found these in someone's garage, sticking out of a bottle shaped like a fish. I knew exactly what they were, because of some time spent on eBay (I swear I was looking for something else, but somehow I ended up with searchTerm="puppet"). You can find them online pretty easily for as little as $10 - $15. The only reason I hadn't bought one already was because once I start buying puppets online, where would it end? However, when you find something at a yard sale, that is like a Sign. The Universe brought me to this particular garage and it led me to the shelf with the fish bottle. It was $6 for the pair. I immediately picked them up and took them over to the cashier (by cashier, I mean "old dude at a card table") to reserve them. I didn't want to carry them around and risk messing them up, nor did I want anyone else to swoop in and buy them, in case there were any other puppet fans at this particular sale.

As Josh and I left the sale, we each carried one. The sun was at our backs, and we used them to talk to each other, admiring the intricate shadows cast on the suburban street.

I'm so excited about these and the fact that my growing collection now features shadow puppetry. I've put on my problem solving cap to figure out how to display them in such a way that the light hits them just right. Maybe some kind of shadow box?

It just goes to show that you can really buy anything at a yard sale.

the visual week, 4.28.13

This week:

Josh hung up our hammock, and I basically never left it,

but Remix was not allowed on.

I bought something amazing at a yard sale (that I will be sure to tell you about later).

And Spring continued to remake the world.

patriotic radish.

I was thinking about problem creators and problem solvers, and I think there is another category of people, we'll call them problem noticers. These are the people who look at the world and find something that could be improved. Many of us wander aimlessly through life, using whatever tools we've always used to do what we've always done. Problem noticers say there could be a better way. Problem noticers say there should be an app for that.

Being a natural problem solver, I'm not sure how much I can really become a problem creator. But I can improve my problem noticing.  Since I've finished with wedding decorations, I was on the lookout for some way that I could use my new-found love of papercrafts.  I noticed that I needed a custom poster frame.

I have a poster that I bought at a puppet show. Not the puppet show at the socialist book store, this was a completely different puppet show that I didn't tell you about. I guess I'll tell you now. It was disappointing. There were not enough puppets. And the script suffered from a bad case of Complaining But Not Saying Anything. They pointed out that a lot of people died in Iraq. I'm not quite sure who didn't already know that, particularly among the people who go to puppet shows. They pointed out that corporate lobbyists wield a lot of power in our government. They pointed out lots of things, and I wanted to say, "Yes, and..." each time. They didn't want to have conversations about anything, just point at things.

Anyway, I did buy things at their merch table, because I like to support live puppetry. I bought a couple of homemade books about making puppets from household items. I skipped the many tracts that continued in the vein of pointing at things. And I bought a poster. It was a colorful picture of a radish, and it said "PATRIOT" at the top. According to the fine print, it was a picture from their 2006 Homeland Security Vegetable Calendar. I think the vegetable calendar said something about sustainability and looking to nature in these difficult times. That is my interpretation, but I really have no idea.

I read up on the radish to try and figure out if there was something patriotic about it or if those guys just stamped words on pictures of vegetables. The radish did not originate in North America, so maybe the latter. But the radish is quite a fantastic little plant. It's a trap crop, which means it's planted next to other crops to lure pests away. The bugs each the radish leaves, but they don't bother the tasty roots. They're very hardy, and you can grow them pretty much anywhere. The seed's oil can be used as a biofuel (possibly patriotic?). In Oaxaca City, Mexico, they celebrate the Noche de rábanos (Night of the Radishes) every year on December 23, where people get together to eat, dance, and carve radish dolls.

Now we have all learned about radishes.

So I had this patriotic radish picture, and I wanted to hang it up. But I noticed that I needed a frame. Enter paper crafts. I saw some frames on the internet made by taking colorful magazine pages and rolling them up. As usual, it took me a while to get the knack of rolling the pages up tight enough, and I got hot glue everywhere. But at the end, I had some colorful rolls.

Then I cut them into 2-inch pieces. I was not very precise on this step. I chose to do rough measuring, and then that would add some natural variation in the finished product. In art, lazy measuring can be part of an artistic vision, rather than just sloppiness.

I got ahold of a giant cardboard box and cut out my frame base, using the poster as a guide. I attached the frame back to the front, being sure to leave an open edge to slide the picture in. Continuing my trend of using very expensive tools, I went with painter's tape here.

And finally, I glued each little roll to the frame. The rolls overhang the poster about 1/4-inch on the inside. I tried to keep the inner edge even, so that any variation in the lengths shows up as the outer border.

It turned out okay. Now that I've done it, I'm not sure that this poster is really the right piece for this kind of frame. Or maybe two-inch rolls are too wide for such a tall poster. But whatever, I made it and hung it up, because it was way better than the poster drooping on my dresser.

And finally, continuing on this kind-of-all-over-the-place entry, I leave you with something that must be included in any discussion of radishes.

"A radish?"

problem creators and solvers.

With the wedding over, I do not have an obvious creative outlet. No more can I spend my time folding silly little paper flowers and saying that it's worth it because I'm saving a ton of money by using Rand McNally as my florist. I'm pretty proud of myself for how the decorations turned out, and it makes me happy to think about all the guests who have used hymnals folded into pinwheels sitting in their homes right now (maybe in their trash, but technically, that is still in the home). I was actually sort of amazed at myself. I've always done some writing, which is its own kind of creation, but making tangible things is pretty new. And here I went and made a whole lot of things. I made so many things that I was freaking sick of them.

I've always been very drawn to creative people and am consequently very aware of my not being one of them. Sure, we're all creative, blah blah blah, but there are some people who walk down the street, trip and fall and some art comes out their nose or something. They can't not create. I don't wish I was like that, because I have very high self-esteem. I want to be around it, enjoy it, be influenced by it, and in Josh's case, make out with it, but I know who I am. I also know that people like me are necessary, because if the world were all artists, nothing would ever get done, because no one would have invented a standard system to measure time.

I've come to think of creativity as problem solving. That is probably not a good definition, but it's the kind of definition that works for people like me. It works great in programming, because the life of a coder involves being given problems to solve. My problem was that I needed flowers for the wedding and I didn't want to pay for them. Solution: make them out of old books.

But now my floral problem has been solved, and I'm all out of problems. Then I read a quote by Chuck Close, who most definitely would not have come up with a standardized time system but was definitely the type of person I would want to hang around. He said that art was problem creation. And that made sense to me, maybe because I was already halfway there. I'm good at recognizing a problem and coming up with a creative solution. But to be an Artist, you have to make up the problems for yourself to solve.

I have to say, that idea resonates with me. Particularly when Josh tells me about his great new idea (problem creation), and I have to explain to him all the many ways in which it is completely impractical, thoroughly unnecessary, exorbitantly expensive, and, a lot of times, really pretty stupid (problem solving). Then we snuggle. And sometimes his ideas are only slightly impractical, next to free, and they end up being kinda fun and cool. They are still generally unnecessary, but that's art. Art is technically unnecessary. You don't need it to live, it just makes life worth living.