Breaking cleanly from the starting gate

Everyone who is anyone knows that I’ve been reading books about horse racing lately; therefore, I feel it is worth a blog post to advertise the fact that I’m stopping. I know that it’s shocking and that I’ve devoted miles and miles of cyberspace to praising horse books, but I think I finally managed to OD on horse-related non-fiction. At least, that’s what I was thinking when I woke up repeatedly last night from horse-related nightmares.

Now, to be fair not all of my nightmares last night were about horse racing. Some of them were about work and some of them were about some asshole stealing both of the bumpers off of my car. Most of them, however, were about horse racing. I’m not even exactly sure how they were about horse racing; I only know that I kept waking up in a panic, concerned over paddock boots and “break clean” from the starter gate. To make matters worse I was in that hazy intermediate state of coherence and kept having to reassure my soggy mind that there was no part of my life that resembled a horse race.

The terrible thing is that I was on such a g.d. roll with reading horse books. In the last two weeks I’d swept through three, one on Secretariat, one on Seabiscuit, and another on Ruffian. I started a book on Man o’ War last night and I fell asleep reading it. In hindsight I think it was the book on Ruffian that really did me in though…There was a lot about riding towards the light with shattered ankle bones toward the end.

Anyway, this has developed into a very belated and boring post so I’ll stop while I’m still ahead (or at least not that far behind). I’m going to retire with some very tame literature this evening – I’m thinking something about the prairie at about the 5th grade reading level. Any book that mentions the use of sunbonnets to preserve a racially-charged paleness of the skin is like a sedative to me.

Showering, sharing

I had a hard time getting up this morning. I probably need to go to bed earlier but the evenings go so quickly and I am taunted by people who are always mentioning that they go to bed in the early hours of the morning. I wish that I was the kind of person a) capable of entertaining myself in an un-internet related way until the dark of the night and b) could exist cheerfully on little sleep. But I’m a person who needs sleep. When I don’t get enough sleep I am grumpy and I feel twitchy and sweaty, no matter how many showers I take.

(More boring news on my personal routine: For the last couple of days I have been showering in the morning. This is a catastrophic change for me, a life-time night-time showerer with long hair. I thought that morning showering would help me to wake up more easily but it usually just makes me want to crawl back in bed.)

Part of the reason that I was up “late” last night, beyond the fact that I didn’t get home from work until 7-ish, is that I have been trying to read this book about Secretariat. I’m not really one for reading nonfiction, but I do try to write nonfiction and that seems to be a horrible disconnect. In some weird writing book (I read a lot of those) the author talked about writing what you want to read, and while I am partial to short nonfiction and essays, I consume novels at a gluttonous pace. Ergo, me and Secretariat.

I know that I don’t talk about horses or horse racing ever on this blog, but as a youngin’ I was sufficiently obsessed with horses to leave a residue of obsession in my older, wiser, and Seabiscuit-desktop-background years. I grew up around horses, ridden Western with long spilt-reins of colorful nylon; always brown, always safe, always plodding, reliable and friendly.

Teenagers typically get some bee in their bonnet about rebelling, but I was a sissy and a predestined sap of the liberal arts, so I kept my rebellions sly and symbolic. As a teenager I was surrounded by faux-Western culture, therefore I wanted to be a fancy-pants rider with white jodhpurs and a red hunting jacket. English riding is about a lot of qualities that I can’t claim (calm, good posture, level eyes, neatness of appearance, and measured movements) and therein was the allure. Riding was a challenging thing for me, but the form in which I obsessed over it was definitely a classist preoccupation. Brainwashed by hundreds of girl-and-her-horse books, I wanted Thoroughbreds, white cotton saddle pads, and white picket paddocks; to me these things implied poise and stability.

I’m not nearly so silly now, but I still get a bit excited over Thoroughbred racing. I like to read about it, to hear the newscasters inevitably referring to the insurmountable “heart” of the horses, to see the pictures of these million dollar-athletes being hosed down. Plus, it’s a good time of year to be excited over it. Last year my main squeeze and I contemplated holding a Kentucky Derby party (hella Mint Juleps and big hats) but our plans were foiled. Provided that I don’t have to work on that Saturday, maybe this year I’ll have an occasion for wearing my over-sized sunhat. I need to practice my swoon.

3/18/2010? Whatever.

Because I am melodramatic and because I am, essentially, a glorified chatterbox I tend to enjoy finding my life and burdens very trying. There are other times, however, when I find my life hilarious. This (now, here, precisely) is one of those ignoble hilarious times.

I am sitting at home this evening (home after an afternoon working and a morning of mild Bud-Light-regret) and talking about buying a house. If you are waiting for the hilarious part, please pause further – buying a house is not a hilarious thing, it is a freakishly complicated intimidating thing, worsened by questions of river rock and character.

The hilarious thing is that I am discussing this while dining on a dinner of expired pesto (3/18/2010? Whatever.), peach pie and cookies-and-cream ice cream. The whole thing = deliciously immature.

Just when I think that I am getting the hang of being adult-like, I indulge myself in a little dessert-for-dinner action. Sure, I’m reading a novel that interchanges boring Victorian diary entries with saucy passages on an extramarital affair, but I don’t understand that serving a peach pie with anything other than plain vanilla ice cream is a crime. (What am I trying to prove with my preindustrial novel, you ask? It is only of note because I am reading a book that epitomizes the overlap of boring sentimentalism and pornographic imagery that characterizes the chick-lit market. No teen wizards here, brother.)

Oh, life.

Yo Amo NY

Today is the first day of my tentatively amped up blogging schedule and I would like to note that I am dressed in a way that completely undercuts any attempt to make that sound like an ambitious statement. I know that I don’t usually discuss my writing attire here (it only accents how I will never will my secret dream of being a photo-a-day blogger) but it’s Sunday and as mentioned previously, I am notoriously lazy on the weekends. So, space cadets, to my attire and beyond.

I am seated at my computer desk in a pair of flannel pants, an oversized shirt that reads “Yo Amo NY,” a robe and some slippies. This is not what I usually wear when I blog, or for that matter, what I am usually wearing at 6: 45 on a Sunday night. But tonight is a strange night because today was a strange day; I attended and overdressed for a livestock show today and this, coupled with having a hurried meal at an Applebee’s off of the freeway in Lodi, made me eager to shower.

I stand fully behind the logic of my fashion choice for the evening, but the fact that blogging in my slippies requires mention unearths an entirely different issue. Slippers and blogging go together like biskits and gravy, no? Perhaps for your normal well-adjusted blogger (haha….ha), pj-bloggin’ is a fact of life. That is not, however, the case for me.

I read an essay by Sarah Vowell earlier this week in which she defended her decision not to drive a car by saying that her joy as a journalist didn’t often require her to wear shoes, let alone drive. This passage stuck in my mind because it so keenly contradicted all of the self-help-y stuff that I have read about writing in the last six months – most of the Dear Abbys in the world instruct getting fully dressed everyday to secure productivity, and some of the more romantic suggest that you are getting dressed to honor the art form that you practice; thus I pull on my jeans, socks, and sneakers everyday to honor pounding in frustration at my keyboard. I brush my hair to honor peeks sneaked at my email and I iron my blouses because I don’t want these blog posts to know that they are hours stolen from the golden gauntlet of billable projects.

I am going to shore this sucker up because I have a lot of work to get done tonight, whatever my wardrobe might be suggesting about me. I just caught a glimpse of myself in the yellow-framed mirror hung opposite my desk; I was shuffling back into the office with a water bottle, hair wet and slippers fuzzy, the tails of my robe dragging on the carpet behind me. Although this is probably the last time that I will ever blog thus, I encourage you to picture me writing every blog in this exact fashion.

On being (and seeming) learned

In my sparest of spare time this week I have been reading Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris and I am almost certain that I like the collection of essays about loving books and the side effects thereof (correcting typos on menus). However, reading this collection has awoken my old nemesis/pipedream. The particular nemesis that I am referencing (for my nemesis-es are only outnumbered by my groundless fears in the census survey of my imagination) is my struggle to seem well read and well educated in conversation. I can throw out a large word or a mildly cultured quip, if pressed, but when confronted with the actual intelligentsia I have no doubt that they would quickly discover that the majority of my vocabulary comes a vigorous spelling test in the 10th grade and most of my quips are lifted straight from sitcoms.

Anne Fadiman is well read and well educated and she also scores well in the bonus round of “flaunting it.” I’m not trying to be mean (if I were you would certainly know it and think less of me), merely honest. The essays are great but this chick – and she would almost certainly protest that familiar mode of address – spoke of reading the poetry of Virgil as though it was no great feat. Moreover, she actually knew other people who had read Virgil and wanted to talk about it!

I was envious of Fadiman’s educated social set while reading the first few essays but when my ego regained the upper hand in my cerebellum I regretted my wish. I, a snob in my own right, think that Virgil is a great name for an animated eccentric scientist and I don’t want anyone discussing him in any other light in my presence.

Blaspheming aside, there is a large part of me that wishes that I had a solid grasp of the classics. I have a decent basis in English and American literature but the antiquities are lost (ha…ha…) on me. I have a tenuous understanding of how to use the word Platonic when one isn’t trying to explain a messy break-up, but the other poets and philosophers meld together in my mind, forming a large toga-wearing mass of wisdom. I’m not even sure if I could use the phrase “existentialism” in a way that would make me seem awesome without some serious premeditation.

To add insult to injury (not that Fadiman did anything specific to injury me besides being downright scholarly), I was stumped several times today while watching Cash Cab in a sandwich shop. An elderly couple on their way to a steak and shrimp restaurant knew gobs more about late-‘90s politics, McCarthy-era theater, and Mexican holidays than I did.

Cripes.

I fall into the bipedal train wreck category

Anyone who knows me is aware that I have certain masochistic tendencies when it comes to movies and television. I only like things that are either absolutely fantastic or incredibly, heart-wrenchingly bad. I am completely indifferent to things that are so-so; I could live without shows that are mildly touching or occasionally funny and movies that worldly but so boring that people actually notice the soundtrack. My tastes are suited for either a masterpiece or a train wreck and nothing in between. (As a personal note, I also apply this philosophy to my friends and associates. Now look within your heart and decide whether you fall into the category of sublime humanity or bipedal train accident.)

The above paragraph, like most of things that I say on this blog, is really just a fanciful disclaimer for what I am about to reveal. Over the last week I have watched – somewhat regularly but always while multitasking, I assure you – a time travel period piece that did a serious molestation job on Pride and Prejudice.

I know, I know. I take any chance that I can get to make jokes about Austen acolytes and here I am hypocritically streaming an off-brand miniseries. Give me a break, it’s not like I’m reading those saucy P&P continuation books, the main purpose of which is to explore the sexual inclinations of the dynamic duo. Actually, I just searched for some of these sequels on Amazon to make sure that I was right about the saucy thing and I discovered one called The Darcys and the Bingleys: The Tale of Two Gentlemen’s Marriages to Two Most Devoted Sisters in which Darcy gives Bingley a copy of The Kama Sutra. Win to me.

In spite of this saucy Austen gunk, no one with a fondness for awful period pieces could have turned down something listed as “Lost in Austen.” Add time travel complicated by the fact that the travel is transporting the character into a fictional realm (another favorite convention of mine) and I couldn’t stop myself.

I guess that’s enough quibbling. I watched the damn thing and it was a marvelous, horrible experience that touched the evilest parts of my soul. The main chick, let’s call her Present-day Austenite, is in love with the fictional Darcy and her strong emotional connection with the novel opens a portal in her bathroom into the world of the novel. (Yes, this is explanation that is given. No pseudo-science or mysticism. Just pure, icky, emotions.)

Things only got more awesome. Present-day chick and Elizabeth Bennet switch places and Present-day chick is able to live out her fantasy of being in love with Darcy. There is an erroneous marriage (resolved eventually through a mysterious lack of consummation) and the obligatory time-travel recovery scene, where the Present-day chick finally becomes acclimated to the time period and learns to use a fan properly. [Fans are the go-to social barrier for time travel movies. Is there a male equivalent for this? Is it sword fighting?] Darcy then travels to modern times, where he is confused by television and anyone who isn’t white!

I won’t gush anymore about the hideousness of the entire affair but I will spoil the ending. The Present-day chick stays with Darcy and the movie closes on a time travel make-out scene (exactly identical to her frequently-referenced fantasies) in front of a mansion. Bam! Time travel neatly concluded, with no discussion of how the alternate reality came to exist or whether she should return to her own time and family.

I can only think of one way that this miniseries could have ended better. If the make-out scene turned into a woodcut illustration and the camera zoomed out to reveal that the woodcut was actually a page in P&P, I would have wept with joy. You can just imagine the rest; the pages would flip in some imaginary breeze and the cover would slam closed on the greatest time travel/alternate reality, low budget period piece ever told.

Old ladies with studded belts are my peers

If it wasn't enough that I have many signs of old age in physical maladies (carpal tunnel) and disposition (tendency to yell at neighborhood kids for having their music too loud and driving recklessly), I seem to be developing some senility.

Para example: last weekend I was in a used bookstore (teeny aside that is too large for a mid-sentence parenthetical but I don't care: why can't I work in a used bookstore with middle aged ladies with untamed grey hair and studded black belts ala Good Charlotte?) and I was having trouble remembering whether I had read O Pioneers! by Willa Cather.

Once I slid the book out of the heavily populated Cather shelf and looked at the back-cover I remembered it as the story of the inventive sister amongst stagnant bohemian brothers. When pressed I could even recall the vaguest hint of a romantic subplot involving an equally forward-thinking neighbor boy. And though the plot took shape with concentration, I was still floored by my initial indecision. Through my entire academic career (one far more lengthy and arguably more successful than my career-career) I was known for having a good memory for texts. When talking about books I am more likely to name favorite descriptions than to outline actual plots. Don't get me started on my love of re-reading descriptions of milking pans, gin-based alcoholic beverages mixed before 1960, patent leather saddle shoes and medicine cabinets.

All of that nonsense washing around in my brain and I can't remember even remember if I have read a novel!? In a strange desperation I wanted to re-read Oh Pioneers! and also This Side of Paradise, the plot of which beyond prep school fraternities and poetry vaguely alludes me.

I suppose that the difference in my comprehension is logical and the reason two-fold. Primarily I have less time for reading than I once did and so must shove it into lunch hours and the customary time before bed when I have chatted Kevin into stupification/sleep. More than anything I am an endurance reader (less than anything I am an endurance runner). And so these disjointed and episodic reading binges make a novel stick with less cohesiveness than one read in a single, lemonade-y sitting.

Secondly I have been pushing myself to read things that I don't particularly fancy but that I imagine will further my "education." Thus I read Hardy's Far From the Maddening Crowd and Woolf's To the Lighthouse in recent months. I have yet to decide whether these things really further my understanding of anything. Mainly they further a tendency to gloss over descriptions of landscape (a feature that you will notice is consipucously missing from the list of things that I love to read).

So here's to re-reading the classics (term used with ample grain of salt) and never making mental progress.

Not fables, but gory stuff

I won't pretend that I don't enjoy some moralizing literature every once and a while. There is certainly something to be said about books where the willful sinners get the dramatic and allegorical death and the simply foolish ones mostly commit suicide or sacrifice themselves for the betterment of society.

I once suggested to a friend back in my english-ing days that we should amass all of the books about English girls who are awfully fond of nature as a metaphor for their loose morals and then die in childbirth, usually cursing their own weakness and asking for the nature-baby to be baptized. I wanted to try and get 70s and 80s movie adaptations for these novels and compare them (all of them tend to have dramatic hair and lots of saxiphone), perferrably in a marathon format.

Currently I am reading Far From the Maddening Crowd which I chose based on the name, thinking that perhaps it would contain excellent passages on how annoying people are that I could use while cursing people on the freeway. It is actually about some sassy young farm chica who is pursued by three men/metaphors. Thus far the able-bodied, prudent, and wise shepherd is pitted against the sulky and obsessive baron and the flippant soldier for the love of the fickle damsel.

Being a bit of a sap for shepherds I'm pulling for him, but I'm not entirely sure he'll pull it off. The solider is a classic rendition of 18th century, smooth-talking, first-name-callin' sleeze, so I'm not worried about him. He's already damned himself by impregnating a servant and then running off briefly to become a professor of gymnastics. However, the old fellow does pose a threat. 18th Century writers love to put the sassy young woman with the sulky rich fellow, when they aren't setting them up for a martyrs death against a backdrop of smooth jazz.

I blame those sad seeming dragons

On Thursday night, as I stood in my bathroom trying to floss while reading about defeat of corrupt gods by righteous sorcerers, I realized I have been doing some fairly atrocious regressing over the last week.

Though I know it’ll sound petulant, I can honestly attest to having avoided fantasy novels for a solid couple of years. Sure, I’ve carted their familiar pastel covers with raised lettering and buckling spines from apartment to apartment, but I haven’t actually indulged in some time. It’s not entirely that I’m too ashamed these days to go around with a sci-fi book sticking out of the front pocket of my overalls (read: my adolescence), though that is a hefty portion of the reason. The other slimmer, but more legitimate, reason is that I truly do enjoy reading what might be termed as “classic literature” and as an added plus I feel as though I’ve earned my plastic-rimmed glasses and poor attitude when I’m through.

For example, when I spend the day lying on the floor chronically re-reading Willa Cather, I consider it a day well spent. When I spend the day lying on the floor reading fantasy novels, however, I feel sort of like washing my eyes out with soap and writing really mean anonymous comments on Tolkien fan fiction sites when I regain my vision. And yet, I can’t stop.

It’s terrible, actually. It all started last week when my main squeeze brought home a book rejected by the library. It was a hefty tome with a giant dragon face on the cover and an incomprehensible title; outwardly I joked about the inexplicable fondness of fantasy writers for bisecting names with apostrophes but inwardly I was mighty curious about this sad seeming dragon. My main squeeze laughingly suggested that I might want to read it, and I laughed to in a furtive sort of way.

Unfortunately, I barreled through the dragon book in a few days, and then immediately took solace in another (less commercial, if that is any more defensible) fantasy novel.

To be clear, I know that fantasy novels are crap. I even make a point of reading them quickly because I’ve fond that oftentimes the 300-page subplots about warring amongst the dwarfish people are completely irrelevant to the overarching (and it’s way overly arched) storyline. But there is something strangely endearing about them.

The problem is this: when I read lines of convoluted passages made up of the words “fate,” “empire,” and “moonstone” strung together in 20 different ways, I will snort sarcastically and roll my eyes but this doesn’t seem to deter me from continuing through that book (or its inevitable sequels).

My only hope is a resurgence of my equally unappealing George Elliot phase.

Post-Mary-goes-blind Post

I’m afraid that I’ve been terribly bad about blogging lately. In my defense, I have thought about blogging fairly regularly. I think about it when I’m sitting in my cubicle drinking my re-heated decaf tea (softened even further with incongruous coffee creamer), plucking squashed strawberries from a zip-lock bag and having some thought that I suspect might be clever.

However, lately when I get home (ah, look, a reformed employee who does no on-the-clock-blogging) I have not the least desire to gaze with my usual adoration into the screen of my computer. I don’t even have my usual yearning to look up Amish-made pony carts on craigslist.

I’ve felt very acutely like lying on the carpet and cloud-gazing at the shoddy popcorn ceiling (being opposed to going outside now that the weather has turned dreadfully warm). On days of particularly intense apathy (and now I’m waxing oxymoronical) I’d like to shut my brain off entirely and watch post-Mary-goes-blind episodes of Little House on the Prairie of a specifically sentimental vein. That's right, only the really god-y ones that star Michael Landon, were written by Michael Landon and produced by Michael Landon.

But as usual I have blogging guilt. Not because I labor under the illusion that a multitude of people are awaiting my every post, but rather because I labor under an equally heavy illusion of myself as a master-blogger (and believe me, I've gotten even snobbier since I quit the twit).


On the whole however I can't think of too many snippets of profundity that I've missed posting in my recent reluctance. The world doesn't really need one more person whining about the Kindle and chattering on about the embarrassment of finding the gum that you spit out the window miles ago on the side of your car door when you get home.


But for now I should go to bed so that I have sufficient energy to be lazy again tomorrow.

My pledge: no otters here.

I have recently stumbled upon what might be the best kept secret on the internet. If it seems foolhardy to give any numerical assignment to the wonders of the boundless internet, allow me to clarify. Over the weekend I saw something even better than that blog containing only pictures of otters, and that I feel warrants mention. What makes it better is that I wasn’t even looking for an internet-y thrill, but happened upon it while looking over the shoulder of my main squeeze who was inexplicably ended up on Youtube after adding a plush Seabiscuit doll to our wedding registry.

For what it’s worth, my virtual cap is off to you, Underground American Girl Youtube Community.

Oh yes, those American Girls. None other than the Chicago based, hugely overpriced, historically accurate, must have gift for every dorky girl. Being the epitome of dorky girl, I certainly had one. In fact, I had the colonial.

I got the doll for my 8th birthday after months of begging and leaving strategically circled copies in my mother's path of the monthly catalog (which she still receives) that I had sent away for after devouring the books. I can still remember the shock of reading the fuzzy-warm American Girl rendition of the American Revolution. Apparently the whole affair can be summed up by girlfriends, so symbolic of their respective countries, torn apart by political values though they shared moral and cultural ones. That’s pretty deep for a chapter book with little pictures showing the period vocabulary in the sidebar.

So there are these girls (presumably) who are putting elaborate videos of varying qualities, using American Girl dolls as the primary actors. I had intended on going into detail about one particularly dismal director, but I’m pressed for time so I’ll just air my primary reaction to this phenomenon.

These are children, equipped with what one might once have call ed imaginations. And where we once viewed the imagination as a private affair (and after adolescence something somewhat embarrassing), it is now the makings of a fanbase far surpassing in numbers what few friends these webcammed history buffs may have.

What is the youth coming to, when it proudly displays its imaginary friends to the world in slightly grainy footage and bad sound quality, and invites their comments?

No automated cursor here.

If there is one thing that I enjoy more than obsessively reading the blogs of emotionally stagnant teens (Please, no more white backgrounds and personalized cursors, you dreary little punks), it’s reading the same material in a vaguely early-modern format.

I recently finished reading The Coquette after having put it off for some time because of an irrational fear that someone might think I was reading a saucy novel in my cube on my lunch break. However, I have lately whittled down the unread portion of my main squeeze’s collection to only novels with compromising names (current furtive cubicle read: Sons and Lovers) and so after a few suspicious glances at the cursive-handwriting font of the title, I started in on The Coquette.

It saddens me to even make this comparison, but the periodic letter format full of romantic drama and parental reprimands was delightfully similar to the electronic epistles of some of my favorite teenie-bloggers. Get it? It’s like teenie-bopper. I’ve just made it up, but mark my words, that media-savvy new president of ours is going to be dropping “teenie-bloggers” before long to prove his groovy vocab.

So where was I? Yes, indeed. The Coquette was what a teen blogger would write, if teen bloggers where clever and well-spoken. Also, it was what a misery-blog would be if blogs had morals, which perhaps they should.

To prove my point and show my earnestness, I’ll tack the same moral onto this one as was slightly more obviously tacked onto The Coquette.

Don’t go around rejecting pleasant clergymen just because you are charming and used to be engaged to an old fellow. Relishing autonomy and sexual freedom will only end in one way: dying in a shabby roadhouse birthing your illegitimate baby while your mother and god-fearing friends sob into embroidered handkerchiefs in parlors across the eastern seaboard.

I almost used an exclamation mark in this sucker

Sometimes I am a bit overwhelmed by my general resistance to change. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go plowing through what laugh-tracked sitcoms might call my “issues;” I just wanted to revel in my dogged love of re-reading crappy books.

I just finished reading Under the Volcano by M. Lowry, which was a challenge, since I usually tend to zone out during swirly, multi-consciousness passages that lack quotation marks. I have been disappointed several times by my inability to stomach stream-of-consciousness modernist writing. Generally I start to waiver and then rebuke myself with a stern slap of pretentiousness. Surely the book isn’t boring, pointless, or a crack dream. It’s obviously art, and I’m obviously a moron.

To return to my point, if I can indeed claim to have one, I read Under the Volcano for two reasons. One is that amazon told me that I might like it. The second is that it is referenced rather frequently in another book, Second Hand that I somewhat regularly re-read. I like Second Hand; it’s obvious and pop-y and the main chap wears tweed pants and suffers from “emotional hang-overs” after embarrassing events, which is certainly something I can relate to.

I liked Under the Volcano slightly less. I like things to be conclusive, and although it ended with plenty of carnage, I didn’t get the feeling of any real catharsis. I like things neatly concluded (tragically or not), which is perhaps why I spent yesterday afternoon holed up in my apartment watching It’s a Wonderful Life and eating spaghetti from a Tupperware. Now that is a firmly concluded story.

Speaking of things referenced, one of my favorite bits of Under the Volcano was when the brother laments being served tea as a sailor because he had read Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. I read The Sea Wolf recently (during my London phase, closely documented on THIS VERY BLOG) and it was a real naturalist ringer. Full of stabbings and hard-tack and people who try to burn the boat down after they’ve been presumed in a coma because they are plumb crazy atheist sailors with hands like shanks of meat.

The only time skim milk is acceptable

Excuse me for sounding obnoxious and hyper-patriotic on a Wednesday afternoon, but sometimes a Coke is just awesome. I’m having one now and I’m pleased as punch.

I don’t have too much to relate (my brain is the mucky state at the crossroads of bored and caffeine) so I will just share a few random thoughts to avoid being called a blog-bandoner.

1) It’s a “free jeans” day at my workplace. It is very unnerving to see coworkers who would never usually soil themselves with denim donning it painfully for a show of solidarity. People get insulted if you don’t wear jeans on “free jeans” day. Strangely they are often more upset at this than they are if you violate the everyday no-jeans policy.

2) I am forcing certain persons of my very close acquaintance to experience select volumes of prairie literature. I’m pleased to find (yet again) that my brain has not evolved to a point where reading descriptions of skimming milk is not the most pleasant thing comprehendible. Please, list yet again the process of dressing in wool for sub-zero weather. This is how I get my kicks.

3) It has been quite cold and I was very excited that the weather had finally decided to act like winter. However, the sun came out very determinedly this afternoon and rendered me incapable of fully appreciating a semi-truck with a Christmas wreath attached to the front. I simply cannot enjoy thinking about that truck driver making the long trek home in snowy weather to arrive in the nick (I’m really resisting a bad joke here) of time on Christmas Eve when I’m busy sweating inside of my car.

While I am yapping on about the weather, I’d like to petition for it to rain already, so that I can use my totally bitchin’ umbrella.

I make no secret of being a pansy

I just finished reading “White Noise” by DeLillo and although I feel sort of barbaric typing it out, I wish someone would have actually died. It’s not that I’m bloodthirsty. Quite the opposite actually. Usually I am squeamish as hell. I can often be found quailing.

Speaking of this (and I’ll return to my clumsy attack on someone else’s art in just a moment) I have been thinking lately of scenes in movies in which someone gets their head bludgeoned and spattered.

You know the sort I’m talking about. It starts with a fight or tense discussion. They grapple, the bludgeoner grasps for something heavy, we get a shot of the soon-to-be-bludgeonee on the floor (eye’s all squinty and hands held up in defense), followed by a shot of the bludgeoner lifting the blunt object over their head, moving into a quick down-swing. And then, you hear a wet crunching noise and you know some bloke just got bludgeoned. Probably there will be some blood on the walls or face of the violent-freako with the blunt object. Call me lily-livered, but I hate this sort of thing.

I invariably close my eyes for this sort of scene. And I suspect that if I were ever to be in a ballistic manifestation of my general grouchiness, I would refrain from punching someone in the face out of an abject fear that it would elicit this exact crunching noise.

But back to “White Noise.” The main fellow in this book (as well as many other characters) was obsessed with the idea of his own death. And although it seems more optimistic to think that we should all privately grapple with the idea of death and learn to deal with it, I rather wanted him to die. He just seemed so tormented that I thought it might be more pleasant for him to be freed from the anticipation.

I’m not trying to be morbid or particularly sadistic. I liked the guy; he wore black plastic glasses and so do I.

This blog is free, so it probably has anthrax

As I skipped every instrumental track on the CD playing in my car this morning, I decided that I am into very obvious aesthetics. I like songs with words, paintings with glaringly apparent subjects and I feel just dreadful about certain modernist novels. Not all modernist novels, obviously, but the particularly sassy Irish ones.

I may be dense (and I just ate three buckets full of hummus for lunch, so I probably am) but I like to believe that it’s a matter of taste. I can’t be blamed if I buy into the pleasant simplicity of the narrative arch.

And speaking of narrative arches [standard seamless segue to follow]. Last night I was reading this article in the free Sacramento Bee my non-fiancé and I scored (it was just sitting on top of the newspaper box, asking to be taken or poisoned with anthrax) last Sunday. It was a regular column, a dual opinion thing written by a father and son, addressing some previous column in which they argued over whether the father should pay for the son’s gas. Apparently there had been a reader uproar over this, and the familial duo was rebutting accusations that the son was spoiled.

I could not resist rolling my eyes as I read the son’s defense. Yes, he knew that he had “entitlement issues” like all teens, but he solemnly believed that this didn’t show an improper upbringing. On the contrary, he believed that he would grow up to be an upstanding citizen and good provider for a future family. In his opinion, he was an okay guy.

“Stupid teenagers,” I thought. “I don’t care how many houses you built on a summer abroad program in Guam. I bet your father wrote this in an effort to pad your college application packet, so that you can get into a flashy university and in four years become a sloppy semi-employed person like me.”

And that’s when I realized. I’m a jerk. What’s more, I’m a jerk with possible entitlement issues and a free Sac Bee in her bathroom.

I'm pro procrastination

I thought of a really great idea for my return to the blog arena last night when I was falling asleep. I quite clearly recall reminding myself to remember the idea, and repeating it to myself to be sure. Quite obviously, since I am biding my time here typing away, I definitely forgot about it.

Shamefully, I didn’t forget about my blog. I wish that I could say that I had forgotten about it and had since been happily cured of my internet amnesia, but really I’ve just been madly avoiding writing. I’ve considered it many times. I have been reminded oh-so-gently by my admiral boy-companion. There have been many days that I’ve been at work, staring in wonder at the automatic spring-operated Post-it dispenser and considering bloggish thoughts.

But instead of laboriously opening up a Word document, I have elected to do a mess of other things. Like getting my wisdom teeth removed and surrendering my face to the dread swell disease for a week. Or failing at job interviews and sobbing into my pleated skirt. Also procuring matrimonial engagements.

I would consider going on here, and whining about the obnoxious sweats-wearing cell-phone obsessed families in the waiting room (why is this a common theme in all waiting rooms?) or about how I want to read some fluffy news stories that aren’t at all about Obama, but I just can’t find any, but I think I’m going to stop here.

I would very much rather read this Fitzgerald story I am in the middle of, and continue my homage to the alter of procrastination.

I'm easily tricked before noon.

In the early morning I was tricked into getting excited by a false railroading tramp. In my defense, I am never entirely at my best in the mornings, mostly because I never allow enough time to properly wake myself up before I shuffle out of the house. Being anti-breakfast, I used to allow only 15 minutes from my bed to the drivers seat of my damned and unreliable vehicle.

I shudder to acknowledge that my efficiency has decreased chronologically until I now need 30 whole minutes. However, since my beautification routine has gone unaltered I’m pretty sure that I spend that extra 15 minutes either pressing snooze or making sandwiches. My old roommates used to remark that I had a certain “sleep face” for the first hour following getting out of bed that involved swollen eyes and an expression of general distaste. In hindsight, this may have just been a nice way of saying that my head looks weird before I put my glasses on, but I'm digressing.

So anyway, this morning I was sitting at a stoplight on my way to work when a young fellow dashed between the gleaming white mass of my car and the truck in front of me, making his way into the train-yard on the right side of the street. I observed his departing form against the backdrop of the boxcars: flannel shirt, knapsack, and dirty sneaks.

Now I’ll admit that I’m predisposed to thinking about hitching rides in boxcars. Not for myself, obviously, since I’m not into being rattled about and smokin’ tabaccy. But I did recently venture with my quite obliging boyfriend to Jack London’s cabin, and I read The Road (his tract on all things hobo-ing and devious) in preparation.

So I’m watching this kid walk off and I’m thinking to myself, “This guy is certainly about to hop on the underside of this train and see America in some fit of anti-capitalist idealism, getting jailed for vagrancy and joining populist armies all Jack-London-style.”

When I passed him it turned out that he was carrying a gourmet iced coffee beverage with a mighty dollop of whip cream, so I might determined that I was probably mistaken. I’m always disappointed when a possible tramp turns out to be a pointedly disheveled youth.

In other news, today I made a massive commitment to my traitorous car and bought one of those little tape-player-converter things. I know, I know, I’m about 10 years late in electronic trends. But until recently I abstained almost entirely from driving, so I was never particularly concerned with entertaining myself in route. But now I can play my little not-Ipod MP3 thinger to my hearts content.

ALSO. I’m reading Sarah Vowell’s newest book, and I am ashamed to say while it’s good, it’s not nearly sappy enough. I was utterly entranced by her complete obsession with Lincoln in Assassination Vacation, as showcased in her lengthy speculations about how it would feel to cradle the weight of holding Lincoln’s bleeding head as he died.

This newest one is mainly facts with a generous sprinkling of very good zingers. Explanations blaming the uninteresting puritans as the crippling factor in this comparision will be firmly ignored.

Dogs can climb chain-link fences.

I was very distracted last week by my search for employment and various betrayals (artistically rendered by my car with special malice) that I did not write. Not that I feel guilty about it or that I am a blog whiner, but I just thought that I would mention it. In an off-hand way, you understand.

Even though I was too preoccupied to actually perform my blogging duties, I won’t have you going around thinking that my brain was barren, completely free of the pointless sort of commentary that I find suitable for the Internet. On the contrary, I opened my Word program several times last week with the great intent of writing something driveling. But I found that after I had set my window to the correct rambling settings (10 point font, 75% zoom and Print Layout view) I was utterly unmotivated to continue.

So back by popular un-demand, is a list of the things that I neglected to blog about recently.

A) I spend a hearty chunk of my day cruising down the freeway, listening to various yelping DJ’s hawk their stations and while I’ve got no problem with pre-paid self-aggrandizement, I really hate when radio stations run little sampler-platters of the sort of music that they play. In my experience it nearly always leads to a severe disappointment.

For example, an ad might go something like this: “This is blad-blah-blah FM, playing the best music ever, in the best regional subsection of the best state ever!” and be followed by a loud animal call and a series of 5 second spurts of a few songs.

If you are an easily appeased individual like myself, you probably nod along with these partial songs in distracted appreciation. However, I inevitably find that the entire song that eventually follows this compilation is totally crap. And so now I greet these ads with wariness, hoping that each semi-decent fragment will continue to its full length, instead of stopping short to make room for a more obnoxious song. But it never happens that way.

B) I am in a literary funk. And not the fun kind of funk, either. I just can’t seem to finish anything that I start and just meander around starting new things for the sheer joy of getting bored and giving up. On my bedside table there is a variety of ambitious (Daniel Deronda, assorted stories by Maugham, To The Lighthouse) and lesser ambitious re-read (Franny and Zooey, The Fountainhead) undertakings.

Here I would like to make some kind of play on words that incorporated “literature” and “littering,” but nothing really leaps to mind.

C) Twitter. Could it provide me with the happiness I once realized during the AIM away message hey-day of my college career?

Comments.

Holiday-oriented scrub tops for medical personnel...what an industry.

Also, did you realize that Jack London did time in the penitentiary for vagrancy? He also thinks that hobo-ing is the best way to advance one's writing chops. So maybe I'll take to the rails soon, since I am reading The Road and learning all of the appropriate hobo terminology.

Apparently "to kip" means to sleep.