Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

The author is a character from the American The Office, and I thought it was a pretty hilarious book. She totally owns that it's going to be compared to Tina Fey's Bossypants, which I totally love. I really loved having two funny women's books to read, and their voices were so strong and unique to themselves. It really inspired me and comforted me and made me laugh, so essentially, I think it did what it intended to.

I don't know what else to do with this except copy the excerpts that I underlined while reading that totally cracked me up. Also, she throws in some good dating advice in there.


Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) 
By Mindy Kaling

Duante was also, unfortunately, a tyrannical asshole. Maybe I should have gleaned this from the joy with which he told the story about murdering a cow with a massive gun.

Again, I was forced to say thank you. How I continually found myself in situations where I felt I had to say thank you to mean guys, I’m not sure.

It took me a week to find my balance, because once I took both feet off the ground, I employed the ace move of closing my eyes out of fear.

What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.

It is easy to freak out as a sensitive teenager. I always felt I was missing out because of the way the high school experience was dramatized in television and song. For every realistic My So-Called Life, there were ten 90210s or Party of Fives, where a twenty-something Luke Perry was supposed to be just a typical guy at your high school. If Luke Perry had gone to my high school, everybody would have thought, “What’s the deal with this brooding greaser? Is he a narc?” But that’s who Hollywood put forth as “just a dude at your high school.”

Mavis said, quietly, “If you want to go with them, I totally get it.” There was something about the unexpectedly kind way she said that that made me happy to be with her, and not them. For some reason, I immediately thought about how my parents had always been especially fond of Mavis, and here was this moment when I understood exactly why: she was a good person. It felt so good to realize how smart my parents had been all along.

So things were coming together nicely for me to embark on a full-fledged depression. One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It’s not like if you’re in Los Angeles, where everyone’s so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you’re down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you’re depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong. But it was still hard to fail, so consistently, at everything I had once been Camilla Parker Bowles–level good at.

greatest source of stress was that it had been three months since I’d moved to New York and I still didn’t have a job. You know those books called From Homeless to Harvard or From Jail to Yale or From Skid Row to Skidmore? They’re these inspirational memoirs about young people overcoming the bleakest of circumstances and going on to succeed in college. I was worried I would be the subject of a reverse kind of book: a pathetic tale of a girl with a great education who frittered it away watching syndicated Law & Order episodes on a sofa in Brooklyn. From Dartmouth to Dickhead it would be called. I needed a job.

I’m the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life.

Have one great cologne that’s not from the drugstore. Just one. Wear very little of it, all the time. I cannot tell you how sexy it is to be enveloped in a hug by a man whose smell you remember. Then, anytime I smell that cologne, I think of you. Way to invade my psyche, guy! Shivers down spine central!

Get a little jealous now and again, even if you’re not strictly a jealous guy. Too much, and it’s frightening, but a possessive hand on her back at a party when your girlfriend looks super hot is awesome.

It makes me cry because it means that fewer and fewer people are believing it’s cool to want what I want, which is to be married and have kids and love each other in a monogamous, long-lasting relationship.

Until I was thirty, I only dated boys, as far as I can tell. I’ll tell you why. Men scared the shit out of me. Men know what they want. Men make concrete plans. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn’t on the floor. Men tip generously. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men go to the dentist. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they’re thinking of kissing you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else before. (Okay, maybe men aren’t exactly like this. This is what I’ve cobbled together from the handful of men I know or know of, ranging from Heathcliff Huxtable to Theodore Roosevelt to my dad.) Men know what they want and they don’t let you in on their inner monologue, and that is scary. Because what I was used to was boys. Boys are adorable. Boys trail off their sentences in an appealing way. Boys bring a knapsack to work. Boys get haircuts from their roommate, who “totally knows how to cut hair.” Boys can pack up their whole life in a duffel bag and move to Brooklyn for a gig if they need to. Boys have “gigs.” Boys are broke. And when they do have money, they spend it on a trip to Colorado to see a music festival. Boys don’t know how to adjust their conversation when they’re talking to their friends or to your parents. They put parents on the same level as their peers and roll their eyes when your dad makes a terrible pun. Boys let your parents pay for dinner when you all go out. It’s assumed. Boys are wonderful in a lot of ways. They make amazing, memorable, homemade gifts. They’re impulsive. Boys can talk for hours with you in a diner at three in the morning because they don’t have regular work hours. But they suck to date when you turn thirty.

My parents get along because they are pals. They’re not big on analyzing their relationship. What do I mean by pals? It mostly means they want to talk about the same stuff all the time. In my parents’ case, it’s essentially rose bushes, mulch, and placement of shrubs. They love gardening. They can talk about aphids the way I talk about New York Fashion Week. They can spend an entire day together talking nonstop about rhododendrons and Men of a Certain Age, watch Piers Morgan, and then share a vanilla milkshake and go to bed. They’re pals. (Note: they are pals, not best friends. My mom’s best friend is her sister. A best friend is someone you can talk to ad nauseam about feelings, clothing, and gossip. My dad is completely uninterested in that.)

Billowing pants: Once, a stylist for a famous women’s fashion magazine dressed me in massive charcoal gray pants with a drawstring. They looked like something a sad clown might wear running errands. Maternity tops billed as “Grecian style” are a relative of billowing pants.

Deadeye Dick

One of the philosophies KV introduces in this book is that of life being a peephole. It didn't stick with me as much as some of the others I've read in his books, but it's an interesting idea.

Deadeye Dick: A Novel 
By Kurt Vonnegut

KV throwing out the main symbols of the book - a bizarre self-spark noting at the beginning of a novel:

I will explain the main symbols in this book. There is an unappreciated, empty arts center in the shape of a sphere. This is my head as my sixtieth birthday beckons to me. There is a neutron bomb explosion in a populated area. This is the disappearance of so many people I cared about in Indianapolis when I was starting out to be a writer. Indianapolis is there, but the people are gone. Haiti is New York City, where I live now. The neutered pharmacist who tells the tale is my declining sexuality. The crime he committed in childhood is all the bad things I have done.

It's funny, I was just talking to a friend about how good it feels to do work that produces something - cleaning, cooking, making anything. Our society rarely appreciates or values labor unless you are the pinnacle example of it, and yet it is so fulfilling and truly vital. And though the goal seems to be success as defined by money and independence, are we often happier than when surrounded by people we love or are at least familiar with, talking, laughing, and eating?

It was surely then that I formed the opinion that the servants were my closest relatives. I aspired to do what they did so well—to cook and bake and wash dishes, and to make the beds and wash and iron and spade the garden, and so on. It still makes me as happy as I can be to prepare a good meal in a house which, because of me, is sparkling clean.

 And on cold days, and even on days that weren’t all that cold, the rest of the servants, the yardman and the upstairs maid and so on, all black, would crowd into the kitchen with the cook and me. They liked being crowded together. When they were little, they told me, they slept in beds with a whole lot of brothers and sisters. That sounded like a lot of fun to me. It still sounds like a lot of fun to me. There in the crowded kitchen, everybody would talk and talk and talk so easily, just blather and blather and laugh and laugh. I was included in the conversation. I was a nice little boy. Everybody liked me.

I thought this was a really interesting take on being a beautiful young woman. Certainly there are women who feel this way, particular the more unavoidably desirable. What is so upsetting and disturbing is the line about what men want to do to her and how ashamed it makes her feel. This is certainly not an outdated sentiment or problem - we have all sorts of issues with rape, and even in small communities of higher education. In college, they teach seminars to incoming freshmen on how to avoid being raped. Yet, as a friend pointed out, we don't teach men not to rape. We don't strictly punish that most despicable of actions, and we often excuse the situation because the girl was drunk or in a dress or flirted. It's somehow easier for us to blame her for being and wanting to be beautiful and friendly and even sexy, and to say that she can't be that way and not expect men to force themselves upon her and violate her. And society compounds that rape by making her feel ashamed and to blame and that she should be quiet about it and let it haunt her nightmares. It's all so disturbing and disgusting and disappointing.

This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.

And because the main character learned how to cook from the servants and loved it so much, there are several recipes throughout the book. A couple:

Polka-dot brownies: Melt half a cup of butter and a pound of light-brown sugar in a two-quart saucepan. Stir over a low fire until just bubbly. Cool to room temperature. Beat in two eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla. Stir in a cup of sifted flour, a half teaspoon of salt, a cup of chopped filberts, and a cup of semisweet chocolate in small chunks. Spread into a well-greased nine-by-eleven baking pan. Bake at two hundred and thirty-five degrees for about thirty-five minutes. Cool to room temperature, and cut into squares with a well-greased knife.

Linzer torte (from the Bugle-Observer): Mix half a cup of sugar with a cup of butter until fluffy. Beat in two egg yolks and half a teaspoon of grated lemon rind. Sift a cup of flour together with a quarter teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a quarter teaspoon of cloves. Add this to the sugar-and-butter mixture. Add one cup of unblanched almonds and one cup of toasted filberts, both chopped fine. Roll out two-thirds of the dough until a quarter of an inch thick. Line the bottom and sides of an eight-inch pan with dough. Slather in a cup and a half of raspberry jam. Roll out the rest of the dough, make it into eight thin pencil shapes about ten inches long. Twist them a little, and lay them across the top in a decorative manner. Crimp the edges. Bake in a preheated 350-degree oven for about an hour, and then cool at room temperature. A great favorite in Vienna, Austria, before the First World War!

How to make Mary Hoobler’s barbecue sauce: Sauté a cup of chopped onions and three chopped garlic cloves in a quarter of a pound of butter until tender. Add a half cup of catsup, a quarter cup of brown sugar, a teaspoon of salt, two teaspoons of freshly ground pepper, a dash of Tabasco, a tablespoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of basil, and a tablespoon of chili powder. Bring to a boil and simmer for five minutes.

Breakfast of Champions

One thing that's great about this book (and some of his others) are his drawings. I could spend a lot more time thinking about the implications of what he feels the need to draw, which things he wants to shape the image exactly in our mind, which he allows us to imagine, and the interplay between text and image. I also really just like the aesthetic of the way his drawings look - simply, somewhat crude (vs. highly skilled), and yet communicative and clear.

Breakfast of Champions: A Novel 
By Kurt Vonnegut

In his own words:

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history. The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.

Some thoughts on the founding of America:

The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. 

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away. The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

On ideas:

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. “The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything."

 On failing to communicate - in a hilarious and ridiculous manner, but still somehow totally spot on:

Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.

 On Conservationism (and God):

“I realized,” said Trout, “that God wasn’t any conservationist, so for anybody else to be one was sacrilegious and a waste of time. You ever see one of His volcanoes or tornadoes or tidal waves? Anybody ever tell you about the Ice Ages he arranges for every half-million years? How about Dutch Elm disease? There’s a nice conservation measure for you. That’s God, not man. Just about the time we got our rivers cleaned up, he’d probably have the whole galaxy go up like a celluloid collar. That’s what the Star of Bethlehem was, you know.” “What was the Star of Bethlehem?” said the driver. “A whole galaxy going up like a celluloid collar,” said Trout. The driver was impressed. “Come to think about it,” he said, “I don’t think there’s anything about conservation anywhere in the Bible.” “Unless you want to count the story about the Flood,” said Trout.

On bad chemicals:

Dwayne certainly wasn’t alone, as far as having bad chemicals inside of him was concerned. He had plenty of company throughout all history. In his own lifetime, for instance, the people in a country called Germany were so full of bad chemicals for a while that they actually built factories whose only purpose was to kill people by the millions. The people were delivered by railroad trains. When the Germans were full of bad chemicals, their flag looked like this: 

Here is what their flag looked like after they got well again: 

After they got well again, they manufactured a cheap and durable automobile which became popular all over the world, especially among young people. It looked like this: 

People called it “the beetle.” 

A real beetle looked like this: 

The mechanical beetle was made by Germans. The real beetle was made by the Creator of the Universe.

 On the most expensive thing you can do:

Dwayne’s waitress at the Burger Chef was a seventeen-year-old white girl named Patty Keene. Her hair was yellow. Her eyes were blue. She was very old for a mammal. Most mammals were senile or dead by the time they were seventeen. But Patty was a sort of mammal which developed very slowly, so the body she rode around in was only now mature. She was a brand-new adult, who was working in order to pay off the tremendous doctors’ and hospital bills her father had run up in the process of dying of cancer of the colon and then cancer of the everything. This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick. Patty Keene’s father’s sickness cost ten times as much as all the trips to Hawaii which Dwayne was going to give away at the end of Hawaiian Week.

 On being a woman:

Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

On being a lonely vegetarian:

He not only did without dead meat—he did without living meat, too, without friends or lovers or pets.

 On writing:

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

On ending a story:

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: • • • And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with “And” and “So,” and end so many paragraphs with “… and so on.” And so on. 

Bluebeard

Keeping up the KV kick... This was a book I read because I could download it from the Austin Public Library, so it was free and easy and I wanted to read more Vonnegut. That is all.


Bluebeard
By Kurt Vonnegut

I read this on my kindle, and these are my underlines from this book. Some of them are just bizarre, some make me laugh, some ring true - even depressingly so, and some seem like pretty good advice. I'll leave you to decide which is which.

During that war we had a word for extreme man-made disorder which was fubar, an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition.” Well—the whole planet is now fubar with postwar miracles.

Still, I insisted that I was as entitled to a Survivor’s Syndrome as my father, so she asked me two questions. The first one was this: “Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?” “No,” I said. “Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?” “No,” I said. “You may be entitled to the Survivor’s Syndrome, but you didn’t get it,” she said. “Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?”

“What’s the point of being alive,” she said, “if you’re not going to communicate?”

Tantalizing? Here’s a hint: it’s bigger than a bread box and smaller than the planet Jupiter.

The widow Berman agrees that Marilee was using me, but not in the way my father thought. “You were her audience,” she said. “Writers will kill for an audience.” “An audience of one?” I said. “That’s all she needed,” she said. “That’s all anybody needs. Just look at how her handwriting improved and her vocabulary grew. Look at all the things she found to talk about, as soon as she realized you were hanging on every word."

“If the cities are still standing when you get to Europe,” he said, “and you sit in a cafe for hours, sipping coffee or wine or beer, and discussing painting and music and literature, just remember that the Europeans around you, who you think are so much more civilized than Americans, are looking forward to just one thing: the time when it will become legal to kill each other and knock everything down again. “If I had my way,” he said, “American geography books would call those European countries by their right names: “The Syphilis Empire,” “The Republic of Suicide,” “Dementia Praecox,” which of course borders on beautiful “Paranoia.” “There!” he said. “I’ve spoiled Europe for you, and you haven’t even seen it yet. And maybe I’ve spoiled art for you, too, but I hope not. I don’t see how artists can be blamed if their beautiful and usually innocent creations for some reason just make Europeans unhappier and more bloodthirsty all the time.”

It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.” Can you imagine that?

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.

A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.” How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”

Father, by the way, refused to touch a camera, saying that all it caught was dead skin and toenails and hair which people long gone had left behind. I guess he thought photographs were a poor substitute for all the people killed in the massacre.

Let me put it yet another way: life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by the brush of a master. Yes, and by some miracle I was surely never able to achieve as a painter, nor was Dan Gregory, but which was achieved by the best of the Abstract Expressionists, in the paintings which have greatness birth and death are always there.

The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.

I complained to Slazinger and Mrs. Berman at supper last night that the young people of today seemed to be trying to get through life with as little information as possible. “They don’t even know anything about the Vietnam War or the Empress Josephine, or what a Gorgon is,” I said. Mrs. Berman defended them. She said that it was a little late for them to do anything about the Vietnam War, and that they had more interesting ways of learning about vanity and the power of sex than studying a woman who had lived in another country one hundred and seventy-five years ago. “All that anybody needs to know about a Gorgon,” she said, “is that there is no such thing.”

He patronized her most daintily with these words: “As the philosopher George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’” “Is that a fact?” she said. “Well—I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.” “Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harvard,” said Slazinger, a Harvard man. And Mrs. Berman said, “Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”

There was one thing I learned during my eight years as a professional soldier which proved to be very useful in civilian life: how to fall asleep almost anywhere, no matter how bad the news may be.

“Painters—and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians,” he said. “They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!” How was that for delusions of moral grandeur! Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.

What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!

Oddly enough, nobody had ever hit me. Nobody has ever hit me.

Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

Slaughterhouse Five

Ever since I taught Slaughterhouse Five a few years ago and then taught a Vonnegut elective in Bulgaria, I've had his books on my mind. I had never bothered to read them before, as I continue to foolishly fail to recognize that well-known books are often so because they are great to read. I completely fell in love with Vonnegut in a strange way. Something about his writing strikes me as so unabashedly human and honest in a unique way. And in spite of his quasi-pessimism, I find the philosophy in his books very comforting and almost hopeful.

Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut

This is one of my favorite things from any KV novel that I've read thus far:

"It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug my shoulders and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'"

I hope that I am able to explicate my reaction to that well enough that the sentiment comes off not callous but hopeful and comforting. I read this book after I graduated college, again in Morocco, and again in Bulgaria. Each time I read it, I was moving forward from significant places in life and leaving behind a lot of people and experiences that I really loved and cherished. While some of those people remained in my life, things weren't the same - as they never are. By nature, I'm very nostalgic and things like that often make me sad, but after I read this book, it made it much easier for me to move on and accept change. I'm now able to pause myself when I have a nostalgic moment or longing for a past person or relationship or experience. I remind myself that whatever it is still is just as real as it ever was back somewhere else along that mountain range. It encourages me to remember things vividly but it is separate from longing or dwelling in the past. It is helping me to create that mountain range in my mind to be as real and solid as possible. The more I do that, the more calm I feel about going into the future, it is easier to accept change, and it allows me to acknowledge feelings I have for things that are no longer part of my reality today. I can allow myself to feel the full love I felt for that person at the time that I loved them and separate it from my feelings today. I don't need to feel that today because it still exists at the time; I don't have to carry it forward with me. So it's also a release of baggage and unnecessary attachments.

While I am so lucky that the people I love the most are all alive and well, someday I will probably have to deal with my parents dying before me and, though hopefully not, potentially someone else I love dearly. Though I will certainly feel devastated and sad and will mourn the future moments that we can't share, I am confident that this will help me move forward and feel comfortable doing so. I will know that being happy in the future and letting go of that sadness slowly will not be to diminish their lives and importance to me. I'll just look across that broad stretch of the mountain range of life and see all those moments in which they were and are and always will be. No future event can ever change those moments, and no death can erase all the moments of life that preceded it.

There is so much more I could and would love to say about this book, but of everything, this is the one that sticks with me the most and that has fundamentally changed the way I see the world and my life. 

Commencement Speech

Don't Work. Be Hated. Love Someone.
By Adrian Tan

Someone posted this commencement speech on facebook, and I've really enjoyed reading commencement speeches this year. I guess since I am not yet on a set track in life, I still feel like one of those graduates, nervously and excitedly anticipating the future.

What I find interesting is that a lot of them tell us to take the pressure off ourselves in one way or another, to focus on other things that matter to use than climbing some kind of corporate ladder. I haven't done research back into commencement speeches of yore, but I wonder if this is some new kind of advice. I wonder if it represents a cultural shift in values and life patterns or just an effort to give home to graduates stepping out into a struggling job market.

Some quotes that I really liked from this speech in particular, which are disjointed, so don't expect them to flow together:

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable. 

The Proxy Bride

The Proxy Bride
By Maile Meloy

A friend of mine posted this short story on facebook from the New Yorker yesterday, and he made it sound like it would be really heartwarming. I guess it could be in some ways, but I'm a little undecided on whether or not I love it.

I did like the writing style and the story concept. I'd never heard of a proxy marriage before, though it makes sense as something that would be useful. 

Maybe what I didn't like about the story was that it was primarily about unrequited, frustrated love, and I guess I sort of empathize more with that. While some aspects of the dedication that unrequited love embodies is admirable, looking at it from an outside perspective, it's hard not to get irritated with the person who is not responsive. I waffle between understanding that someone might just not recognize the feelings another person has and thinking that it really is willful ignorance and insensitivity. I suppose when you're young, you might not have the experience to know what's really going on, and you're already so egocentric anyway. Since that is the age of the characters in the story, maybe I should cut her some slack. And the way the author wraps it up at the end maybe is a more human and realistic love story than the perfect happy endings of most stories. 

Closing Lines from Books

I found this link via stumbleupon to the Best 100 Closing Lines from Books, and I just thought I'd copy and paste a few that I particularly liked for one reason or another.


"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
Origin of Species, Charles Darwin


"But that is the beginning of a new story - the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended."
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky


"A LAST NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR. I am haunted by humans."
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak


"Are there any questions?"
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood


"'When the day shall come, that we do part,' he said softly, and turned to look at me, 'if my last words are not ‘I love you’ – ye’ll ken it was because I didna have time.'"
The Fiery Cross, Diana Gabaldon


"I went on my way. A stormy wind rattled the scrap-iron in the ruins, whistling and howling through the charred cavities of the windows. Twilight came on. Snow fell from the darkening, leaden sky."
The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945, Wladyslaw Szpilman


"This is not a full circle. It's Life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it."
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Alexandra Fuller


"But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy."
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway


"Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days."
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll


"And so we stayed out in the garden of the old house until we couldn’t see to kick a ball, laughing in the gathering twilight, my mother and son, my wife and our daughter, making the most of the good weather and all the days that were left, our little game watched only by next door’s cat, and every star in the heavens."
Man and Wife, Tony Parsons


"One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet?'"
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

Love in the Time of Cholera

I was given this book by a professor in college. He gave our entire class copies of it because we read a review of it by Thomas Pynchon (the course was Nabokov and Pynchon), which was, of course, incredibly poetic. Read it here, and I highly recommend that you do (though it does tell what happens, so if you want to avoid spoilers, wait).

Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I actually read another of Garcia Marquez's books when I was teaching a course on Forbidden Fictions, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which was a very short but, as you may be able to determine from the title, is quite the book. I loved his writing style, and as I was paying especially close attention to his craft because I was going to be teaching it, I really appreciated it. I am a little fuzzy on it now because it was three years ago (where does the time go?!), but I would like to reread it.

At any rate, even though I really liked Memories, I couldn't get myself to read Love in the Time of Cholera until recently. Even then, I had a similar experience to when I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; that is, many people whose opinion I appreciate greatly for literature had recommended it, but I just couldn't get myself committed to reading it the first few times. Love is somewhat slow to get going, and not because nothing happens - in fact, it begins with a suicide. Instead, it is Marquez's incredibly detailed writing style that is so hard to adjust to, I think, in a world of instant gratification and lack of such heavily written sentences. There is a plethora of detail and commitment to description that we tend to shy from in our reading and writing. But Marquez is so good at it that once you are accustomed to it and expect it, it is so beautifully rewarding that you wouldn't want him to use less. Except, perhaps, in the parts when he describes the less politically correct and polite activities of some of the characters, but that he attends to all that his characters experience in such detail, whether it is easy for readers or not, is part of the beauty of his writing. Sexuality is an element of every human's experience (even the unindulged) and depravity part of almost everyone's, to varying degrees. So to include it is to write a truth, even in fiction, about the human experience. It just requires the reader recognize that were their story told, these parts would be put to words and likely seem just as strange on a page.

The moment that caught me in the book was when one character exclaimed to another, "Only God knows how much I loved you." Now this is not so an incredibly creative of a line, but it was at such a poetic and almost comical moment, and such a thing to hear, that it really moved me. I suppose I was particularly susceptible to this and always am because I'm such a romantic, but at that moment I was hooked. And from then on, it was a love story. A stranger one than what we are used to, and unsettling at times, but a love story nonetheless, and is it not a pleasant surprise to read a story in which you cannot predict the outcome or course of events and twists and turns?

I think I will reread this book again after some time to see how my experience and opinion of it shifts after a different perspective and frame of mind, so for now, I leave you with some words from Pynchon's review:

It could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about love, that without the darkness and the finitude there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera -- all genres, by the way, that are well represented in this novel -- but not the Big L. What that seems to require, along with a certain vantage point, a certain level of understanding, is an author's ability to control his own love for his characters, to withhold from the reader the full extent of his caring, in other words not to lapse into drivel.

The Truth About Sleep and Productivity

As a caring teacher, I couldn't help but try and encourage them to do things to help them be better, happier, healthier, and more productive students. I still can't assign them articles like this, but I hope that my students and whoever else happens across this blog will still take the time to think about this and help themselves out by getting enough sleep every night. It makes a HUGE difference for kids and teens, but also for adults. It's worth it!

The Truth About Sleep and Productivity
By Margaret Heffernan

To be honest, this wasn't really new information for me. But it still is good to be reminded of it and see research on it and an explanation of why it is true.

Some of the important excerpts from it:

• Lose just one night's sleep and your cognitive capacity is roughly the same as being over the alcohol limit. 
• Up to around 40 hours a week, we're all pretty productive but, after that, we become less able to deliver reliable, cost-effective work. 
• After 24 hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall reduction of six percent in glucose reaching the brain. (That's why you crave donuts and candy.) 
• But the loss isn't shared equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12 percent to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas we most need for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas, for social control, and to be able to tell the difference between good and bad.

Joy of Cooking

Well, this isn't a book I've read, per se. But it is a book that I got recently and have been spending some time with. There was a groupon to get it at significantly less than it's standard listing price, and I figured that since I love cooking so much (see cooking blog), it would be good to have a classic like this on hand.

Joy of Cooking, 75th Edition
By Irma von Starkloff Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker

I have definitely used the internet much more than the couple of cookbooks I have, but I thought a standard like this should definitely have a place on my shelf. I've made a few cookie recipes, a pork shoulder roast, and a loaf of bread from it so far, and I do like it. I think the format is a bit different, what with the ingredients listed as you use them and amongst the direction text, but I'm adjusting to it. I'm excited to read more about different things and learn about food from it. It has pretty extensive descriptions at the beginning of each chapter about the food and how to identify different characteristics about it and work with it.

Excerpts from the book summary:

Seventy-five years ago, a St. Louis widow named Irma Rombauer took her life savings and self-published a book called The Joy of Cooking. Her daughter Marion tested recipes and made the illustrations, and they sold their mother-daughter project from Irma's apartment. 

Today, nine revisions later, the Joy of Cooking -- selected by The New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important and influential books of the twentieth century -- has taught tens of millions of people to cook, helped feed and delight millions beyond that, answered countless kitchen and food questions, and averted many a cooking crisis. 

It features a rediscovery of the witty, clear voices of Marion Becker and Irma Rombauer, whose first instructions to the cook were "stand facing the stove." 

JOY remains the greatest teaching cookbook ever written. Reference material gives cooks the precise information they need for success. New illustrations focus on techniques, including everything from knife skills to splitting cake layers, setting a table, and making tamales. This edition also brings back the encyclopedic chapter Know Your Ingredients. The chapter that novices and pros alike have consulted for over thirty years has been revised, expanded, and banded, making it a book within a book. Cooking Methods shows cooks how to braise, steam, roast, sauté, and deep-fry effortlessly, while an all-new Nutrition chapter has the latest thinking on healthy eating -- as well as a large dose of common sense. 

Secret Lives of Great Artists

My mom passed this book on to me a while ago, and although it has taken me forever to read, it is really good and easy.

Secret Lives of Great Artists
Elizabeth Lunday

This is a pretty quirky book, and I've never read anything like it before. Basically, there are about 3-4 pages about each artist featured, in chronological life order, and each artist gets a brief little life and art bio. Unlike most other summaries of artists, this features crazy facts about the different artists, many of which I had no idea before. I think it's beyond just voyeuristic to get to peek into their closet of secrets (most well-known by societies at the time) because it often helps inform the viewing of their art better. Also, getting an understanding of the artist's real life can enhance our understanding not only of the person behind the art, but the society as a whole. And as Art History has always appealed to me as a way to better know a culture and time period, I think it's nice to get that extra glimpse and perspective. Plus, it's an entertaining book...

In the words of the write-up for the book on the publisher's site:

Here are outrageous and uncensored profiles of the world’s greatest artists, complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright bizarre facts. 

Consider:
• Michelangelo had such repellant body odor that his assistants couldn’t stand working for him.
• Pablo Picasso did jail time for ripping off several statues from the Louvre.
• Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s favorite pet was a wombat that slept on his dining room table.
• Vincent van Gogh sometimes ate paint directly from the tube.
• Georgia O’Keeffe liked to paint in the nude.
• Salvador Dalí concocted a perfume from dung to attract the attention of his future wife. 

With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo (accused sodomist) to Caravaggio (convicted murderer) to Edward Hopper (alleged wife beater), Secret Lives of Great Artists is an art history lesson you’ll never forget!