I Feel Like I Should Start Reading Medical Journals

So, I feel like a total, full-tilt dumbass right now. And I'm not sure that I should. Look, I'm the first person to admit that I don't know much about office politics or privacy policies mainly because I've never needed protection through one. So that's fine, if I make a statement that makes me look dumb on that account I'll own up to it. Let me set the stage on what leads to this post.

I visit a blog that I love. It's snarky and funny and about a TV show. There was a discussion about the HIV virus. I wondered if, on said TV show, a contestant (It's Project Runway) would have to disclose HIV status so that proper medical attention could be applied if the contestant ever did something like sew through his finger. I set up a hypothetical situation (which has partly actually happened) where a designer sews through her finger - which would bleed - and another designer with an extremely unlikely, coincidental open sore extracts said needle, getting blood in the wound. I admitted to this being very, very hypothetical and downright implausible.

Now, the responses to this really needed to be nothing more than a)that's too unlikely for most employers/production to worry about and b) it doesn't matter because health privacy acts protect people from having to disclose personal issues about their health. End of story. Okay? I'd say, "Now I understand and I learned something about privacy statements."

But it couldn't end there. Am I just that behind in reading up on the transmission of the HIV virus (which I freudian slipped calling AIDS in the first comment and woe is me for that little mistake)? Because what ensued was people telling me that you can't get HIV in that scenario, and also telling me they were worried about my knowledge of how HIV is spread. It isn't true that HIV could (implausibly but not impossibly) be spread through drops of infected blood in an open wound? I actually had a person who thought I thought HIV was a flu virus you could get through the air. Um, you know what, I'm not that dumb. And furthermore, isn't the problem that way too much was read into what was essentially a question about office politics? Where in my scenario, which was clearly laid out as is above, did I imply I thought contestant #2 would get it through the air?

I tried to stay humble, thanking people who genuinely explained things like listing how HIV is spread and who patiently explained about health status privacy. But, it just couldn't end. And I think the real problem is that people read the first comment and immediately wanted to respond without taking the time to see if anything else had transpired before the end of the total comments. There was a person who reminded me about sports where a player is taken quickly off the field before any blood can be transferred onto another body. There was a nice person who reminded me that an HIV positive contestant on the show would probably tell another one not to try to help with the needle without having to disclose why. That made a ton of sense and I agreed that this would most likely solve the problem. I was grateful to a person who said s/he didn't want me to feel like s/he was attacking me because in the time it took to respond many, many more comments had popped up and I tried to reassure that person I had no hard feelings.

My point, though, is that almost 100 comments later it wasn't over, complete with the aforementioned "worried" person and the "you can't get it through the air like the flu" person. Oh, and the person who had to point out that it was freightening that I didn't know the difference between AIDS and HIV which was funny, because many people responded using AIDS when they meant HIV as well. You know, infer that it's a freudian slip. My champion was a person who reminded everyone that HIV could be spread by getting a drop of infected blood in your eye or nose. I knew that but was so afraid of saying it.

Maybe I'm just an idiot who knows nothing about the potential ways of spreading the HIV virus. I feel like I should buy a current book on the subject so I have more information, though. I mean, I try to understand when people just don't have the knowledge I have but I may be asking too much out of others. Anyway, thanks to all the people who were kind about it and patient and just tried to see what I meant and explain where my thinking was off-base. I think I'm just not cut out to be a commenter.

Google Search

Earlier today I went to use google and one of the words I typed was "loose." When I got back my results, not only was the word "loose" in bold letters, but also the word "lose." I did not type in the word "lose." Why has Google decided to find instances where closely spelled words are accepted? Is it because too many people misspell words and Google has decided that anything close will do? I also did a search where I used the word "kook" (don't ask) and Google kept also finding webpages with the word "cook." It brought up thousands more entries than I needed, some of them not ever containing the original word I typed. It was really frustrating. Well, maybe just more perplexing.

Stung By a Bee

So, Saturday night as I was coming into my house, I was stung by a bee. I'm not sure it was a bee, but from the little bump that stayed after the horrible allergic reaction, my family and I can only gather that something either stung me or bit me, and most likely it was a bee. Anyway, I walked in and began itching under my bra. At first, we thought this was a reaction to some new detergent or just from sweat. Well, then it spread up my shoulders, up my neck, down my stomach, began itching on my feet and hands. And it wasn't just hives - it was red, shiny, and looked like I had second-degree burns. All of this happened in a span of about ten minutes.

Did we go to the hospital? Of course not, because I wasn't gasping or swelling.

What we did do was go buy Benadryl, use some antibiotic acne medication that I had on hand, and follow that up with some itching lotion. The next morning it had gone away everywhere but my hands, which were stiff and shiny and with bumps all over my wrists. I sat through most of the day with my hands in my lap (when I was awake - I also had some generic Prednisone left over from a previous inflammation on my legs and spent most of Sunday sleeping heavily).

Everything is fine now. During parts of Sunday and Monday I had stabbing pains in the side right where that little original bump still is, but even those have passed. I'd still like to know what the hell it was that stung me, though, so I can avoid it in the future.


Meanwhile, I'd also like to declare that my divorce from a certain recapping website is now final. I've tried to stick to a recap here, a forum read there [I refuse to post ever again after the terrible (but also hilariously victorious) Jay Leno Show debacle]. But even the recaps are really, really boring. Or wrong. Or just there for the recapper to psychoanalyze himself or tell us how he loved Billy Crudup in Eat, Pray, Love. NGS used to say she found they had developed a mean bite that she didn't like, but I still found the meanness funny. But after having given it one more go, venturing in the latest recap of Project Runway, I just don't think I can take it anymore.

First of all the recapper seemed lazy, barely describing anything at all and only glossing over each event without nary a witty remark. Second, he seems like he doesn't even like this show anymore. I remember when recappers used to be in-the-know about everything that went on behind-the-scenes. Not anymore. Tim Gunn was laughing 'til he almost cried and told a designer to turn that lump of coal up her ass into a diamond. Now, it used to be we'd get the scoop on how Tim Gunn had had a petit mal seizure a few nights before, cut his face and bruised himself badly by falling on a bunch of folding chairs, and was probably on a hefty dose of pain meds during filming. Did we get said info (which is all true, by the way)? Did we get any questions about why the ambulance at the end of the episode was placed at the end of this episode when it was really at the end of the previous challenge that THREE ambulance were called (one for Tim Gunn, one for an out designer for unknown reasons, and the shown third for a designer named Ivy)? No questions.

I just thought the whole recap, and a lot of the recaps on other shows, was just boring and uninteresting, which I suppose are the same thing but also I suppose it needed repeating.

Plus, I have divorced other readers. A good number of them are stuck up their own asses. I'm really tired of the attitude that this website is where real intellectuals go, and how seriously PC it seems to be getting. And by PC, I mean people who have to point out how disrespectful every remark made BY someone TO someone is. Or just how overanalyzed every reaction is. Casanova (a Spanish designer) did a cartwheel when he wasn't voted off? That means he didn't respect the judges' collective descision that he is worth another shot. It can't mean he was HAPPY TO NOT BE OFF THE SHOW. Oh, no, it was really a big fuck-you. This is being debated right now. Also being debated? Whether one designer, who kept interrupting another designer, should have been asked to stop talking over designer #2. Shouldn't we give #1 a pass because she's socially awkward and just thinks she's being encouraging even though it comes off as rude? Should it matter if she's always talking over people if she's doing it with intellectual insights into fashion/technique/analysis? The other desgingers asked #1 to stop talking and somehow, that was rude OF THEM.

I will not even begin the story of the Jay Leno Show argument.

I have more examples. The House thread and all the people who point out every little medical (or plotline) implausibility. People who pick apart Hugh Laurie's American accent because he pronounced one word un-New-Jersian. People who pick apart Tim Gunn because he uses a word pseudo-incorrectly (he said "Tin Woodsman" instead of "Tin Woodman" - isn't he smarter than that? I'm so disappointed in his supposed intellect. Really? REALLY? Get a life! - No, that's not what I want to say - Fuck off!). It is not intellectual to nitpick. Not to the point of having to find a flaw just so you can say you found it. It's your pet peeve when people say "Woodsman?" FUCK OFF!

Oh, and because I will never again log in I will never type the post I've been dying to for a while: To the person who said "cacaphonous" is a sound word but Tim Gunn used it as a sight word, I give you synesthesia. Scroll down to the bottom for the best definition. It was totally appropriate that he would see cacaphony when looking at a garment, used in the poetic sense. Fuck off!

(I've been watching Project Runway the most recently, so that's why most of my examples are from there.)

Anyway, that was a way long post. Thanks for reading it, you one, faithful reader you. I hope it doesn't annoy you when people say "Woodsman."

Mark's Costco Chicken Crisis

So, I follow two or three blogs and I introduced you to one of them a while back in the whole late-night mess. It's written by a guy named Mark Evanier and it's pretty entertaining. The other day, he wrote about an incident at Costco where a few guys hogged every rotisserie chicken that particular Costco had at the moment. You can read the original post here and a follow-up here. A lady was so upset that she would have to wait forty minutes for her chicken she threw a massive temper tantrum to the point of using foul language, insulting employees, and making other customers uncomfortable.

One of the things Mr. Evanier says is that the employees had to take it. That is Costco's problem for making it a policy to accept that behavior. I work at a clothing store, and at the first cuss word or insult hurled at one of our employees the customer would be asked to leave. If the tantrum continued they would be banned from the store. To an extent we have to try to be patient, but it's all about the customer's behavior. This lady's was way out of line and unnacceptable.

My biggest beef with this story, though, is the reaction of the other customers, including Mr. Evanier, who you should know I have a lot of respect for. But, none of them spoke up or countered this lady. I'm sorry, but as soon as someone declares she speaks on behalf of everyone I'm going to interject. Furthermore, other customers should have pointed out how they understood the situation and knew it wouldn't be the norm. OTHER CUSTOMERS should have done something. Is it their job? No. Is it the right thing to do? Yes.

But what does this lady think will be the overall outcome of this experience? Costco can't change their routine for these chickens, really, because they can't make excess chickens for the reason they stated and also for the reason that if they didn't have the two-hour rule this lady would probably constantly get old chickens. She wants a fresh chicken but doesn't want to wait while someone else does the work for her? You can't always have fresh and immediate. You just can't, lady.

P.S. I think the word "chicken" should be plural like "fish" and "sheep."

The Reincarnation of the Netbook

After an automatic update earlier this morning, the netbook died. It was stuck in a loop of telling me that Windows couldn't start normally, so when I would try the thousand things the internet told me to do (I got on my father's computer) it would just loop back to the same screen over and over again. Thankfully, our local rent-to-own shoppe - which my mother has a serious relationship with - told me that there was a secret way to recover the system.

So I lost everything I had stored on here. Luckily, I have learned the hard way to back up anything I fear losing on a flash drive, so I didn't lose much. I did lose the Kindle, and even though I got it back later, I lost all of my notes and marks. Small price to pay to have one of my prized possessions back.

The sucky part was that right after the computer recovered a storm hit and we lost power. I hadn't downloaded the Kindle yet at that point, so I had to read a book - a real book - by flashlight to pass the time. It was kind of hilarious. This is another pro in my long-standing debate on whether to shell out the money for an actual Kindle: it would have, most likely, been able to sustain power to read through that two-hour period. But here's another con: we could have been without power for a long time, and a regular book needs nothing other than a source of light. There's always candlelight.

Northern Nut Growers Association

Last night I was tooling around on Amazon and stumbled across this. I just had to know, and it was free, so I downloaded and read it. And I think I came out a better person.

It seems it's a series, because it's a serious thing. I'm such a freak, because I'm considering downloading more.

Wodehouse

I read the first of the P.G. Wodehouse novels, called The Adventure of Sally. It was pretty funny and interesting. I spent a long night needing to get to the end, which is always a sign of a good book, when it's 2:00 a.m. and there's no way it's getting put down until it's through. It's set in 1920s New York and the dialogue, characters, and plot where quite clever. I only laughed out loud once, but I found myself smiling a lot at Wodehouse's wit (usually through his characters). I'm excited to read the next one.

The Book I Said I Was Reading....

I said a while back I was reading a book called One More Day Everywhere, by Glen Heggstad, but Sherlock Holmes got in the way. Well, I finally finished the Heggstad book and unfortunately I was a tad disappointed. I'm so horrible. I just can't seem to get interested in a book that isn't a story. Yes, of course it was a story, the author rode his motorcycle through many, many countries to meet with people to prove that one-on-one most people are fair and giving. He had to narrate the details in a storylike manner.

But it seems like half the book is about technically getting from border to border, and less than a fourth of it is actual scenes of humanity. Most of the descriptions of cities are accompanied by political riffing or philosophizing and while that's cool it's just more my bag to be shown rather than told. If the pictures in the torture house in Phnom Penh are being described, I don't need any further explanation of what message I'm supposed to get out of them. The horrors of the past need not be forgotten nor repeated. People fearing for their lives if they don't conform to their government are capable of terrible acts against their fellow human beings. Some people in general are capable of horrible acts. I didn't need pages of pontification about it. The pictures (there were actual pictures in the book from this place) speak for themselves.

There was a scene in particular that I remember vividly - one where Heggstad is invited to stay with a Russian farming couple for a few days in order to rest and take a bath. He's just tired, dirty, hungry, and standing in the middle of the road and they happily invite him in, and he just tells the story without all of the hoopla of needing to explain how we should feel about this couple.

I just wish there had been more of these scenes. They were powerful. His scene in an alley with the street mafia of the Gaza Strip was powerful. His Thai lover asking him, Thai-English dictionary in hand, to "Plees no foget me Gaan," was powerful. The teenage Muslim women stripping off their headscarves and robes in a tent and revealing jeans and t-shirts while giggling and doing his (temporary) (pretend) wife's hair was powerful.

I suppose it's my own fault for not have the knowledge to understand his problems with the motorcycle. I think he focused on that too much. Maybe if this was a book just about riding his motorcycle and reporting back the conditions one would find in, say, the backroads of Borneo it would have been okay to focus so much on the details of the motorcycle. But in doing so, he had to leave out a lot of the human stories and the human scenes, and that's what I thought the postscript in the title was all about, Crossing 50 Borders on the Road to Global Understanding.

Shane Sullivan, You Were Right.

So my friend Shane used to argue with me when we were in grad school at Ball State University. What did we argue about? He said that the future of reading would be computerized and I said, quite emphatically, "No." I reasoned that no machine could ever replace the feeling of having a book in your hands or the satisfaction of finding a rare, good read.

Vehemently I argued this. And now, I've spent the last few months reading on my...machine. And drooling over other machines whereupon I could read and store more books (I'm thinking now of getting a Nook, because it would be extra room since it couldn't be the same books as the ones that are on my Kindle PC - well, it COULD be, if I bought them twice, but you know what I mean). Anyway, I always think of him whenever I'm reading on here and whenever I browse Amazon looking for rare, good(free) reads.

Shane died my second year of school, but if there's a Heaven (you know it's got a hell of a band) Shane is pointing and laughing and doing some kind of I-told-you-so-dance.

And the New Book Is...

Oh, yeah, and now I'll also be starting the novels of P.G. Wodehouse. You know, Jeeves and Wooster! There are thirty-three. $2.99. I'll try to make sure I read one novel, then read something else altogether, then read the next Wodehouse novel, etc.

Done with Sherlock (Really, Done with Watson)

I finished reading the complete stories of Sherlock Holmes! Four novellas and fifty-four short stories. I had read some in the past, but took on the entire collection when I was able to buy it for $.99 at Amazon on the Kindle.

Some thoughts:

Watson, like so many other sidekicks, is a complete moron. Now, I know that's not true, and the truth is I liked Watson a lot and looked forward to passages where he was alone on a little side mission or in harm's way. It was the passages where he interacted with Holmes after a solitary escapade (where Holmes would point out the things Watson should have done, things I found myself yelling about while Watson was there, too) and the passages where he is just too far behind Holmes (and even the reader) for me to tolerate. This happens in all your TV shows with really smart main characters, though (Monk and House, to name a few). In the case of Monk, how many times has a seemingly stupid clue caught his attention and proven to be vital in the end? Why can't his cohorts just accept his eccentricity without constantly trying to undermine it? If he thinks the kind of bubblegum the killer was chewing is important, why do his sidekicks have to make fun of him with their "Monk, how could that possible be important?" Well, assholes, you know he's just that friggin' smart and you've seen him solve a case on less, so why can't you just learn to STFU? You KNOW it's an important clue if he notices. I wanted to strangle Watson everytime Holmes pointed something small out and Watson said, "How can that possibly important?" Because it just IS, man. It just IS.

But this is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's doing. Why couldn't he, in just one story, just ONE, make Watson competent? It is possible to have two main characters. He didn't have to ever solve a case, or be a step ahead of Holmes, or suddenly whip out his blackbelt or anything. He could have just...not run into the street shouting at a suspect, alarming the suspect that he was suspected and getting the life choked out of him in the process. As soon as he darted out of the house I was screaming, "No, bad Watson!" He had no common sense. As much as I think Holmes was not much of a grand companion in his own right (smoking, drugs, insensitivity to others, shooting firearms in an enclosed area), Doyle made me feel like he thought readers couldn't possibly keep up with his narrative and so used that age old chorus to represent what he thought readers must be thinking, and he named it Watson.

I suggest that any reader not read the collection en masse as I did. The cases became monotonous, and trust me, they aren't so in any way. It's just that when the same thing basically happens over and over (of course Holmes will solve it, for better or worse - of course Watson will come to no harm, he's recounting the story) it gets repetitive in it's own way. If the stories are broken up so that maybe another story is read in between each one, I think it would be much better.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it very much. I'm also glad I found it for incredibly cheap at Amazon. I had downloaded it for free from one of the "pre-1923" websites but there were obviously so many missing passages and strange typos I couldn't read it. Finding the entire collection for $.99 was fabulous. Toward the end I began to notice a few typos (more than there should have been) but I also began to wonder if it was Doyle's own typos - he would have had an old manual typewriter where mistakes were not as easily fixed, not to mention how they wouldn't be fixed very often if they slipped through to the printing.

All in all I give it a good solid B. Definitely it should be read by every serious reader but I just can't quite give it that perfect score because of the dumbing-down of our dear Dr. Watson. (By the way, I conjecture this anthology was between 1500-2000 pages. I couldn't tell because the Kindle doesn't give pages due to the way you can change the font or make notes. But there was about 20 lines per page and there were about 40,000 lines.)

March 12! March 12!?! Gadzooks, Batman!

Yeah, I'm a friggin' lazy bum. Anyway, here's a random thought for the day to get me back into writing on here each day.

Let’s play a game where we make up a meaning for some of the random words generated by internet ID checker thingies. Today I got the word “liummure” and I just kept looking at it wondering if it’s a word. It isn’t. But what could it mean if it were a word? It rhymes with demure, mature, and endure. Sounds like lemons, linoleum, or illuminate. Begins with lie, ends with you, in the middle is “um.” Maybe it can mean, like, a selective truth? Like when you aren’t lying but instead you just aren’t telling the whole truth? You liummure the truth. Um…yeah.

I'm currently reading One More Day Everywhere on my Kindle PC. Which, by the way, is fantastic as the other day I realized I was watching a movie on my real PC, I had my netbook (which houses the Kindle) propped open in front of the PC screen, while eating dinner on the pull-out shelf that my keyboard sits on. HANDS-FREE READING! It...was...glorious. As it were.

It's a New Week

I will start fresh with a new book this week. I got through about 40% of Rigs, so I will continue to read it and my other travel books on the sly, little by little. In the meantime, the book this week is massive. It's Ada by Vladimir Nabokov (pronounced Na-BO-kov, per an interview I read with him where he set the pronounciation straight; too many people were pronouncing it NAB-okov). As a lot of people know, Nabokov is one of my idols.

Two Down

Two to go. I made it through Catcher and Fahrenheit. I don't know if I can do 1984. I know it's, like, one of the most classic, must-read books of all time but after abandoning Brave New World and hating Fahrenheit, I just don't know if I can do it. I might have to push it back to another time and substitute some different short book in its place. Maybe two of my travel books or something.

But I am looking incredibly forward to Don't Tell Mom I Work on the Rigs!

Goal To Have Read by March 11

The Catcher in the Rye
1984
Fahrenheit 451
Don't Tell Mom I Work on the Rigs

These four books will catch me up for what I've missed and are short enough (except perhaps Rigs) to read in a few days. I will now abandon all other distractions except work (and would even that if I could). No more video games, Netflix, Freddie Mercury documentaries (yep, in the plural), or Mika dancing sessions.

Choosing What to Read

What's wrong with me? Why am I so afraid to read what I want to and why do I force myself to read books that I normally wouldn't give a second glance to?

There is no possible way that any reader reads all the books that are considered some kind of classic. You have your ancient literature, your medieval epics, your renaissance poetry, your romantic novels, your modern masterpieces, your contemporary classics, and now your post-contemporary bore-me-to-tears pieces of crap. How do I decide which ones are worth my time and why do I care what other people have read?

My fear is that someday I'll meet one of my idols, let's say Stephen King or Jonathan Lethem, and they'll ask me what I thought of Fahrenheit 451 and I'll stare blankly ahead and drool. I'll be forced to say something like, "Duh, I got confused in parts and though I usually like poetry in prose, I couldn't read that thing." And they will walk away, aghast.

So why not just read it, you ask? It's, like, less than two hundred pages.

Because it's boring me. And so is *gasp* The Catcher in the Rye. The narrator and dialect of Salinger's book is really amazing, especially for its time period, but I'm so bored. Holy tube socks, Batman, Sylvia Plath was more interesting than these two books. And I hated Plath's poetry.

When in a book is it a good time to give up? These are two classics that I know are classics for a reason. And, again, they are less than two hundred pages each. What's my major malfunction? Am I refusing to give them a chance? Is it okay to admit that I don't want to read them? If I took a list of one hundred classics to any literature professor, what are the odds he or she would have read even half of those books? Slim to none? There are certainly people who would have read all of them because they made doing so a personal goal, but does it have to be my personal goal?

The thing about it is that while I'm bored to tears I allow myself to get distracted and then I go off my schedule because I dread picking the book up again. So it's really wasting more time than I can afford to slowly read two pages an hour. The hitchhiking book? I loved it, couldn't stop reading, read it on two different computers, and used my lovely Amazon gift card to get more travel books for my Kindle PC. Why do I stress about reading these travel books? I enjoy them and I learn something and, most importantly, I enjoy them. Isn't that what it's about.?

But (ah, here's the rub) what if I miss out on the greatest thing I've ever read because I lost interest? Won't the fact that I had to wait so long in a book for it to get interesting teach me about pacing and how to keep readers involved throughout the entire story? Didn't King say I would learn more from the bad books than I do from the good ones? How do I make that distinction because art is subjective? When will I stop asking so many questions?

I just don't know. What I do know is that I'm now about two weeks behind schedule because I couldn't stay interested in those books. They are books I would normally be able to read in a few hours and I couldn't even read them in two weeks, and that's frightening. I'm just not sure whether the blame lies with those books, with society, with my fear of the community I want to be a part of, or with my own procrastination.

Though I am sure it's some kind of combination of each and all.

Money

Why is it that when the end of a long run is nigh, there are those people who would still rather skip corners or take blind shortcuts because they don't want to struggle up hill for a few more minutes? I live with my parents and we are finally in sight of a little relief because my sister and her two children moved out. This cut many of our bills in half. But, my parents don't want to have to struggle for even one minute, it seems. Twice a month, I borrowed money, grudgingly, from one of those awful check-into-loan places. We'd get $190 dollars and have to pay back $230. We lost forty dollars each time, which is eighty dollars a month or $960 a year. We were losing $1000! I hated it. But, for the most part, we did it because the bills wouldn't wait another five days because they were due (*cough* behind *cough*). Now they are all caught up except one, which will be caught up by March 5 if we just struggle for the next few days.

We just have to get through the next three days until my father gets paid on Friday, then everything will be all right. But, we don't really have many options and money is tight. We have food but we'll have to make some crazy, surprise, make-em-up kind of meals out of it. We have gas, but it means that all other people will have to be told "NO!" when they ask us to take them to their girlfriend's, then to work, then to their house, then back to their girlfriend's, etc.

But you see, my parents don't want to have to worry about struggling. So, they want me to go get another check-loan thing so we can buy some groceries but then we'll lose out on that $230 we would have to buy groceries on Friday. Why can't we just wait a few days and struggle and get out from under lost money? I ate cheese, summer sausage, and crackers every day for dinner for my first month of grad school. It sucked but I lived.

Anyway, I refused to go get the loan. My father threw a fit and my mother cried, but you know what? It had to be done. I told them that if we never did it - if we always said, "Maybe this will be the last time," it really never would be the last time. So I'm saying, "The last time, it was the last time. We'll live."

Big Words

I'm reading a book about hitchhiking called Riding with Strangers: A Hitchhiker's Journey by Elijah Wald. I can't tell you the page because I'm reading it on my Kindle PC, but somewheres about 75% of the way through the book he uses the word lagniappe.

Sylvia Plath, Aldous Huxley, and Freddie Mercury

My reading goal this week was to read two relatively short books. The first was Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. I enjoyed it well enough. I can see its significance but didn't find myself ripping through the pages worried about what would become of the narrator. I did very much love the similes she used throughout. It was charged with a lot of breakthroughs for its time period, with raw descriptions of depression and sexual revolution and the true meaning of asylum. I would personally give it a "C," though I think it important for every generation to read to understand how far we've come and how much farther we need to go as far as understanding our own psychologies.

The second book was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It's been a long time since I've had to abandon a book. I just cannot read this. I have never been the biggest fan of science fiction, especially that which depicts an elitist future. I think it's that I get too angry and I don't want to spend the whole of a book being too angry. A professor gave me Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale for my birthday one year and I tried to read it but had to stop. It's on my list of books to read this year, but I'm dreading it.

Right now I'm watching live concerts of Queen on Youtube. Freddie Mercury was the greatest performer. I really do wish at times I was a gay man. I found myself singing along with crowd - Freddie Mercury always used to lead the crowd in doing some trilling and the crowd would try to mimic him as closely as possible. I had to participate. Long live Freddie.

Writer's Block

Oh-my-friggin'-god...I'm going to call myself an artist.

Because that's what I am. I'm an artist. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Not just Arts - Fine Arts. I'm a fine artist. Except, I've abandoned my art because I've become a little yellow scaredy pussy cat. "Are you sure this was written at the graduate level?" she asked. "It feels like undergraduate writing to me." And my first (and current) inclination was to say, "Where do you draw that line?" Because I knew a good deal of undergraduate writers whose art blew the socks off of some graduate writing. Off of most graduate writing, really.

It wasn't about my writing, though. It was about putting me in a class of writers because I enjoyed playing with that red-headed step-sister we all know as "genre writing."

Fucking literati.

It's a problem with the writing programs in general. They are brainwashing writers into using the same dull, safe techniques in order to be considered "literature" as opposed to "mainstream" or the dreaded "formulaic." Um, I really hate (love) to tell them this, but when I've cracked open the past few years' worth of the Best American Short Stories I can't help but feel all of the stories are so...FORMULAIC. I feel like I can open any page and read it, then skip ahead to a totally different, random story and it's as though I never stopped reading the first story. They all want to talk about the psychology of their mundane lives, or the pain of trauma A, or the details of trauma B...blah blah blah!

I love trauma. My characters are always cliched-ly abused or perverted in some way. I know I fall into this habit, as well. But isn't there an interesting way to weave it into a captivating story anymore? Are we past the point where we want adventure, or entertainment, or fantasy when we read? Are we past the point where those things can mean intelligence instead of immaturity? In the world of graduate writing programs, the answer is "yes." The lady from the second paragraph, the one who had to make a distinction between graduate and undergraduate writing, said that Harry Potter isn't deep or complex. Pardon? This, of course, led to my infamous retort to her that made all of my classmates go "OHHHHHH." I don't even remember what I said because I was so angry. After this conversation, she took every advantage to make me feel like I didn't deserve to be there anymore. Which, for a long time, I began to believe.

You wanna know the formula for current literature?

Small town + trauma + feelings = literature.

Slice-of-life. Ugh. Double Ugh. I'm fully aware this may be my preference for epics coming through, but I know I've read exciting slice-of-life fiction and this current crop of writing ain't exciting. Earlier in one of my posts I talked about the Virgin Suicides, which follows the formula and is still riveting.

Small Ohio town + multiple suicides + narrator's feelings = fuckin' awesome.

I think here it is the absolute obsession of the narrator with what went wrong, and the fact that we are removed from the actual feelings of the sisters, that make this story so engaging. We won't ever really know why the girls committed suicide, we can only speculate, we are only given clues. The story isn't told from the "I" point of view. The boys in town are telling their obsessive "we" point of view.

I feel like every current short story is "I." Because that's the narrator who can tell his own feelings best.

Maybe I can't just talk about feelings. Maybe I have to be cryptic. Maybe I feel all icky and maybe I feel like it's telling instead of showing and maybe I feel like that goes against the grain of good storytelling and maybe I feel like people can't understand someone else's feelings unless they're shown where those feelings came from in the greatest detail possible. Current short stories...all they do is give the least amount of detail possible to set a scene so it can showcase all the FEELINGS the characters are experiencing.

And so, for a long time, I tried to write about feelings. I tried to mimic those stories in the Best American Short Stories, because a book called about editing told me I should do this. Well, what it tells writers is that a writer should follow all of the advice these two editors (who wrote the editing book) give in the book if you ever want to be published, and then they go on to give examples of writers who did what they were told and got published, and writers who did not do what they were told and got nothing. And then...AND THEN...they take excerpts from The Great Gatsby and re-write them using their advised techniques to show how the book could have been better.

To show how The Great Gatsby could have been better. With their help.

And you know what? After they laid their hands on those books and stories and the Great Gatsby each piece of writing lost all of its character.

But I thought, what if this is what I have to do to get published? What if this is what I have to do to be called "serious?" What if I have to abandon my own voice in order to have any voice at all? I was scared.

No fucking more.

I will do as I please.

Watership Down reminded me of what I love to read and why I love to read it. I tease my best friend about her romance novels, but in the end I understand what they give her. What did a book about rabbits give me? Adventure and suspense and characters I gave a damn about. They, in effect, ceased to be rabbits and by that point the story is all that mattered and it was a BRILLIANT story. So is Harry Potter. So is The Dark Tower series. The rabbits are a metaphor for survival, war, and brotherly love. Harry Potter is a symbol of the abilities of everyday human beings who aren't really all that "special" but are clever and heroic. Roland is an obsessive, abused, smart man who feels he must save the world and feels he must personally lose everything to do so. How are those things less artistic than: Watership Down vs. Animal Farm; Harry Potter vs. The Old Man and the Sea;
The Dark Tower vs. The Grapes of Wrath?

But all of the second entries in each comparison are considered "literature." NO FUCKING MORE. I think there is some kind of unspoken rule that if you enjoy the book, grotesquely enjoy it, it is not allowed to be literature. I have decided not to care. I have decided that if I enjoy reading about an 800,000-year-old cybernetic bear who is taken down by a gunslinger and his white, heroin-addicted sidekick and in turn his black amputee lover, I will enjoy writing said sort of story and, therefore, others will enjoy reading my story. Will these stories win me a Pulitzer Prize? Nope, not in a million years. Is that what I'm giving up to save the world? I believe so. I believe art cannot be homogenized anymore. Something must be done. It looks like I'm going to be the one who does it.

Longest. Post. Ever. (not really)