Hey folks. I've moved DISCONNECT to a brand spanking new site. Please click on over and poke around. Here's the link: DISCONNECT or if you're a copy and paster http://www.disconnecttheblog.com Hope to see you there.
Oh, and if you need more incentive to hop over to the new space, here's a photo from my latest post:
If you're anything like me, and unless you're a nonhuman you are, your memory of your childhood gets fuzzier and fuzzier the older you get. There are people for whom this isn't a problem. Let's call them journalers or diary keepers or people who thinks it's not talking to yourself like a crazy person if you're writing it down instead of saying it aloud. I have never been one of these people; therefore, I can no longer say with any certainty how old I was when I received my first diary. I think some member of my family who thought they understood all little girls may have gotten me a pink one with a lock and key and flowery lined pages when I was somewhere between the ages of 2 and 17. I don't recall ever writing in it, preferring to instead spend my spare time playing Truth or Dare with the older kids on my street. I once dared a preteen guy named Brandon to pee in front of me, which he had no problem doing because back then I was thought to be, at best, completely sexless or, at worst, such a die hard tom boy that I may have, in fact, willed myself to grow my own boy junk. Anyway, Brandon held up his end of the bargain, but I was too shy to actually watch. This is why, when I'm dead and Jen or whoever is in charge of going through the personal effects of those who die all alone in this world is going through my things, they won't find a girly diary with a, "June 15, 1989--Today I saw a penis. Meh." entry.
The first time I concretely remember getting a diary was at the end of the summer break between my 6th and 7th grade years. There was a gap of a few weeks between the time my elementary school started its fall term and when my new junior high went back in session. For those few weeks, I volunteered in the multi-handicapped classroom at what had been my elementary school. I volunteered with a teacher named Christa Sprinkel. I don't recall that we got to know each other terribly well, but that's perfectly logical given that my teenage angst bloomed early, and I wasn't very pleasant to be around. At the end of the last day of my six weeks of service, Mrs. Sprinkel presented me with a thank you gift. "Every young lady should have a place to record her thoughts," she told me as I opened the journal. The cover was designed to look like a cross section of a pink geode. The pages were gold leafed. The attached bookmark was pink satin. That bookmark is still safely nestled between pages 3 and 4. Out of the sense of guilt and obligation that I felt as a gift recipient, I gave writing in the journal a try. I've been an insomniac since birth, so one night (truly, it could have been any night) when my thoughts wouldn't turn themselves off, I sat up in bed, grabbed my new journal, and tried to write exactly what popped into my brain as it popped. This was a colossal failure. Eventually I started to feel silly, so I ripped the page out and threw it away. I realize at this point in my story that it's starting to sound as if there was something inside of me, something too horrible to let out, even in my own private journal. Perhaps I was coming to terms with the fact that I'd had a huge crush on Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer when I was in the 4th grade and how that coupled with the fact that I had, in fact, snuck a peek at Brandon's peeing penis (or did I?) had led me to realize that I was as gay as the day is long (that's 24 hours gay even during Daylight Saving Time) and I just couldn't bear to admit it to myself. No, I think the destroyed journal entry went something like, "Oh my god, why can't I sleep? Why can I never sleep? I want to kill myself I'm so tired of being tired." So you can see that it really was a wasted page that deserved to be torn out and tossed aside. That was all the journaling I had in me for another sixteen years or so.
One Christmas a few years ago, my best friends got me a journal. By this time I'd started writing semi regularly, so the blank page had become a whole different kind of terrifying to me than it was during those sleepless junior high school nights. This journal's a good one. It's brown with a black and orange plaid pattern and an orange elastic band to keep it closed. It's the perfect size. It feels good to hold. My friends even took some of the scary out of the journal for me by inscribing it with a very nice yet undeserved note about my writing ability. In fact, maybe this wasn't a journal after all. Maybe it was just something for me to have on hand--something more convenient than the back of an ATM receipt. It seems like the sort of thing a serious writer would carry around for when random musings try to burrow out of her skull, so I did. I carried this journal around in that other ultra important accessory of the super serious--the messenger bag. It was always with me. Thanks to my new it's-not-a-journal-journal attitude, I was occasionally able to scribble some words down in this bound stack of cocktail napkins. Since I now carried it with me everywhere, I found it was particularly useful in potentially awkward social situations. For the first week or so that I worked at the bank, I would sit in the lunch room and write furiously so that no one would think to talk to me. This sort of behavior has, in the past, helped people come to the understanding that I'm a standoffish bitch, but in reality, like a spider, I'm more afraid of you than you are of me. Eventually I got to the point where I wasn't afraid of my banking friends, so my plaid journal shield was no longer necessary. That's when I stopped writing in it regularly. I still have it, and it has far more content in it than any other journal I've ever tried to keep, but still...
I suppose the biggest reason I haven't felt the need to keep a journal over the past 4 years is that I don't have any private thoughts. I have a girlfriend. We share a life. Every third conversation that goes on between the two of us starts with, "Remember the time...?" And we do. We remember the time. So why, you would ask if you knew to, did I go out and buy a fancy new leather journal yesterday? Well let me tell you.
I don't know exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the line I became the sort of person who likes to read biographies of both the auto and not-so-auto variety. I also like history books. And I've noticed something. Famous and important people keep journals. They always have. What do Patti Smith, Virginia Woolf, and Doogie Howser all have in common? They are/were diary keepers.
The tipping point for me was with the book I'm reading now, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. It's about the shooting and subsequent death (more than 2 months later) of James Garfield. The book itself is interesting. His shooting never would have happened today since the guy who shot him would have been on everyone's radar from moment one. Oh, and we actually employ people to protect our presidents these days unlike in 1881 (yes, even after Lincoln), but the thing that has had the most profound impact on me to this point in my reading is--dude wrote shit down. The book is chalk full of excerpts from Garfield's journal. So I got to thinking, if keeping a diary is good enough for the 20th president of the United States, then by god it's good enough for me. Also, I like the smell of leather.
Like I said earlier, I bought the journal yesterday. Not wanting to waste any time, I decided to draw further inspiration from Mr. Garfield before attempting my own entry. Included in the pages that I read yesterday was a brief note from Garfield's diary written on the day he unwittingly came into contact with the man who would, just a couple weeks later, shoot and kill him. After future assassin Charles Guiteau showed up at Garfield's church and made an ass of himself, Garfield commented that Guiteau was, "a dull young man, with a loud voice, trying to pound noise into the question." Pretty boring, right? Well not once you add the context. I mean, that dull young man is plotting to kill the very man who finds him boring. Sometimes I want to shoot people who find me boring too. (Shh Carrie. Save those kinds of comments for the diary.) As I read Garfield's thoughts I think, my god, I could be shot tomorrow leaving nothing behind but some Ikea furniture and a well stocked bar to help historians piece together the puzzle of my mind.
A woman's diary is sacred, and it's possible that I won't feel safe pouring out my deepest darkest thoughts and desires if I break the trust by relaying here what I wrote there nearly 24 hours ago, but I can leave you with my entry's closing line, because some thoughts are too important to be kept under lock and heart shaped key. The line is, "I'm giving this journaling thing another try so that one day T & S can know for sure that I loved eating fish sticks with them." Just wait 130 years and that shit's going to blow your mind.
I try to post something new on here every weekend, but as of yesterday afternoon, I still couldn't think of anything I wanted to write about. I mentioned my problem to Jen, and she said, "Why don't you write about what it's like to be in a relationship with a crafter?" Which is her way of saying, why don't you write about how amazing my pillows are? I thought, I'm not sure I'm ready to go public with that information.
While I think I'm pretty good at treating everyone the same regardless their age, sex, race, religion, or propensity to get involved in DIY projects, the thing you should know is that on the inside I'm judging everyone. Critically and all the time. When I was a kid always assumed that the only people who chose to make things that could more easily be purchased at Pier One were poor people (We didn't have a lot of money when I was a kid, but by god if I needed new jeans, my mother bought them for me. What 12-year-old wouldn't rather show up to school wearing something made in a sweatshop by one of her Chinese peers than something that looked **gasp** homemade?) and middle-aged cat ladies who've never known a man's touch. I was self-conscious about the possibility of being associated with the former and, while I'm proudly on a collision course with the latter, I was describing applique sweater wearing spinster crafters not gold-star lesbians in my crafter categorization. Then, after living within close proximity of Clintonville for most of my adult life (for non-Columbusites think 90-year-old $200k houses, organic farmers' markets and Tom's Shoes) I added a third "crafter type." The Pretentious. If you've read the first 283 words of this post, you'll note just how hypocritical this assessment is.
Over the course of the last month or so though, I've had to rethink my stance on crafting.* Not because I'm less right than I was a few weeks ago, but because I love Jen very much, and rethinking is the only way I can come to terms with our new lifestyle.
I don't know when Jen found Pinterest, but I first noticed close to Christmas when I realized we hadn't spoken to each other in about two weeks. We lived together. We ate together. We worked together. But it was clear that I was no longer the apple of her eye. All of her time was spent pinning. If you don't know what Pinterest is--good for you. No good can come of it. I will tell you that as far as I can tell, aside from being a potential destroyer of healthy relationships, Pinterest is like a personalized, visual bookmarking system. You know how you might go to espn.com to read about the latest douchey thing Lebron James has done? Well with Pinterest you could bookmark that online article to your own page and, instead of just showing the link so that you can get back to the article anytime you want, it will pull a picture of Lebron James looking douchey from the article and "pin" that to your page. If you still care what I'm talking about or my description makes no sense, I suggest you click this Pinterest hyperlink and take a look around Jen's page so that you can see all the things she finds more interesting than me.
As far as I can tell, 99% of the people on Pinterest are not pinning sports articles. No, the primary focus of Pinterest seems to be pretty things. Lots of cookable things, but mostly crafty things. If you already date someone who pins things and you ever hear her (let's be honest, this is not a dude activity) say, "hey, I could do that," it's all over.
Jen first fell down the rabbit hole over New Year's weekend when we went to Erie for a postponed Christmas with her parents. Jen had little faith in her own crafting abilities, but her mom is something of a genius when it comes to making things (especially if there's sewing involved), so Jen thought it would be a nice bonding experience if she and her mom could spend the weekend making some of the things she'd found on Pinterest. She was right. It was a nice bonding experience. Since I entered the scene, Jen's mom hasn't gotten much alone time with her daughter, so I was happy to spend two days drinking rye and trying to blend into the furniture while Jen and her mom made some pendants and t-shirt scarfs. New Year's weekend proved to be significant for Jen in that she realized that she really does have the ability to make pretty things that she's finds on the internet. It was significant for me too, because it was the first time I realized that every trip to the craft store from now until the end of my life will cost at least 50 bucks and that just setting foot in a Joann Fabrics can trigger the onset of menopause, even if you're a man.
They say (incorrectly) money can't buy happiness, but I'm here to tell you that crafting can. Since New Year's Jen has spent many of her evenings and weekends at her desk in our bedroom cranking out crafts, and I've never seen her filled with such joy. She started her momless quest into craft with handmade coasters, or as I like to call them--the thing everyone's getting for Christmas this year.
We now have more coasters than we have glasses, but that's okay. They do look pretty cool, and they make her happy. Once Jen mastered coaster craft, she decided it was finally time to recover some throw pillows of ours that she's always** hated.
Sewing the new covers for the pillows turned out to be something of a challenge. Jen has moved her grandmother's old sewing machine to and from 5 different apartments since she moved to Columbus with the poor old thing (the sewing machine, not Jen) collecting pounds of dust and cat hair all along the way and, to my knowledge, she never even plugged the thing in until about two weeks ago. The thing you have to know about Jen is when she wants something, she wants it yesterday. So you can imagine how frustrated she must have been when after we got home from a $50 jaunt to the craft store (fabric, pillow forms, thread) and after 45 minutes of trying to thread the needle on her machine, the damn thing wouldn't sew. She called her mom 3 times, she looked online for help, in a moment of desperation she even asked me if there was anything I could do. There was nothing. She would have to do the unthinkable and wait.
The next morning Jen and I threw the defective sewing machine in the trunk of our car just in case she could find someone to fix it while we were out at work. Jen and I work at an ad agency, and most of the people we work with are of the computer geek variety, but crafters can smell their own. She reached out for advice to everyone in the office who emitted the scent to no avail. By the time I got to work at 1:00, I could see that let's-just-buy-a-new-sewing-machine look in her eye. It's the same as the let's-go-to-Lowes-and-buy-more-tile-for-my-coasters look and the I-really-like-this-sweater look. I'm powerless against this look. Luckily when I asked her if she was going to ask me to take her to buy a new machine, she pointed out that that would be ridiculous, "but I did think about it."
After work, we went home and she shut herself in the bedroom while I drank scotch and glued my eyeballs to a super boring GOP primary debate. Sometime between Newt Gingrich's first and 478th condescending eye roll, Jen came out to the living room with a smile on her face and a length of fabric with a perfectly sewn hem. "The needle was on backwards," she reported as she headed back into her workroom (where we also happen to sleep). Twenty minutes later, she came back out with an even bigger grin and a lovely decorative pillow. And that's when it happened. That's when I added a fourth "crafter type." It's the person-who's-stressed-out-99%-of-the-time-who-is-made-to-feel-calmer-and-happier-when-endeavoring-to-do-something-creative-and-seeing-that-project-through-from-conception-to-completion type. Having spent many an hour with nothing more than some Swedish hieroglyphics and an allen wrench, sweating and swearing right up until the moment the last screw is tightened on some pre-fab furniture, I can sort of understand where these people are coming from. It's fun to work with your hands. To make something pretty. I couldn't do what she does. It's not just the desire I lack. It's the patience, the vision, and the skill.
So, as long as we're in election season and the news networks are hosting 2 debates for me to watch a week, it's fine by me if Jen wants to spend all her free time pinning and crafting. I just hope she doesn't plan to bring her bottle of Mod Podge along on our vacation to Asheville in March. I'm fairly certain there are signs all along the Appalachian trail that warn, "Please don't decoupage the mountains."
*Just this morning, Jen and I had a mini debate about exactly crafting entails. She said, "I don't think sewing clothes is the same as crafting." I countered, "It's crafting if you get some perverse satisfaction out of making something yourself that you could buy for less money." **By "always" I mean ever since she got on Pinterest.
As some of you reading this are probably aware, in 2003 I
went to Toronto with a chronically depressed, bulimic morphine addict and did
the most sensible thing I could think of--I married her. I didn't really want
to, but I also didn't want to hurt her feelings, and since the whole getting
married thing was the reason we drove the 8 hours from Columbus in the first
place, it seemed like I should hold up my end of the bargain. The closest thing
I had to a bachelorette party was when, the day before we were to be married,
my betrothed couldn't bring herself to stop doing drugs get out of bed, and I spent the afternoon walking around town alone. I did some
window shopping and treated myself to dinner. Then I went to Second City. The same improv company that brought us Dan Aykroyd and the lady who played Kevin's mom in the Home Alone movies. We'd
already gone once, but I found out that every evening after the official
performance, anyone who wanted to could stick around or come in off the street
and watch company rehearse for free. So I went and, while I waited for the show
to let out, I had a couple drinks at the bar and flirted with the bar tender.
This was the highlight of my time in Toronto. There were brief, hopeful moments
when I thought maybe, just maybe my fiance would be too altered, tired, busy throwing
up, or some combination of the three to go through with the ceremony. Well, let
me tell you, love really does conquer all. That girl, who just 12 hours before
hadn't been able to hold her own head up, sprang out of bed like a gymnast when
the big day finally arrived. I've officially been married for 8 years, 4
months, and 10 days, and I've regretted every one of them. Well guess what the
number one requirement for getting a Canadian divorce is. If you guessed being
a Canadian resident, you win a block of 100% pure maple candy.
Anyway, I've written about this epic
mistake before, and it's not the point of this post. The point of this post is
that a little over a week ago someone in the Canadian government tried to say that my
super legitimate marriage was, in fact, invalid. Not because at least one of us
was high when the ceremony took place. Not because a big part of the reason I
agreed to get married was that I was afraid my girlfriend would kill herself if
I said no. No, they were saying my marriage was invalid because neither my wife
nor I are Canadian citizens. The nerve.
We know now that the proclamation was a false alarm, but I nearly cried when
I first heard that I might be off the hook where my marriage was concerned. The thing is, I'm now in a relationship with someone
whom I'd very much like to marry. In this country. When doing so becomes legal.
I don't know much about the United States' polygamy laws. I don't know if, once
they legalize gay marriage here, my big Canadian screw up would automatically
transfer, making me also legally wed in this country. Another thing I don't
know. Where my wife is or whether or not she's still alive. What I'm saying is,
I wish my friends up north would decide that my marriage is invalid, I'd be
just about the happiest discriminated against lesbian you'd ever meet. And
that's the sticky wicket.
The threatened invalidation of the estimated
2,500 same-sex marriages that have been conducted over the last 9 years would
be great for me, but it would be kind of a kick to the balls for the other
2,499 couples (okay, let's be honest, what's the divorce rate in this country?
I'm not the only person who hasn't seen their gay Canadian wife/husband in more
than 5 years). My point is, making sure that gays don't get kicked in the balls
is something I care deeply about. Specifically, marriage equality for same-sex
couples is something I not only care deeply about, but that I also actively (by
active I mean once every few months) advocate for through my website, I Can't Get
Married. And that's why what I've already said, that I think it would
be awesome if all the foreign gay Canadian marriages were declared invalid, and
what I'm getting ready to say make me a hypocrite, and an asshole. Here goes.
As far as I'm concerned, the Canadian government would be right to say same-sex couples from other countries who were married in Canada aren't really married after all. Those foreign gay
Canadian marriages have never been valid in any legal way that matters. Not really. When I got
back to Ohio after getting hitched, I wasn't any more married than I had been
before I left. I couldn't file my taxes with my wife (full disclosure: she was
on disability and food stamps, so she didn't exactly have to file anyway). No
one would defer to me when it came to deciding what to do with my wife's body
in the likely event of her unfortunate demise. We couldn't appear on
The Newlywed Game. And just as my marriage wasn't recognized
here, and I, therefore, couldn't benefit from all the wonderful, U.S.
government sanctioned benefits of marriage, neither was the Canadian government
having to grant me any of the legal benefits that go along with being a wedded
Canadian couple. I don't know what these benefits are, but I assume
personalized hockey jerseys are part of the deal.
According
to some of the reactions I'm reading about, non-Canadian gay folks are up in
arms about this recent proclamation. They feel like if the Canadian government were to invalidate these marriages then said government would be
discriminating against them. Well let me clue you in on something. The Canadian
government wouldn't be discriminating against you. YOUR UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT IS
DISCRIMINATING AGAINST YOU! Suppose I wasn't already married in Canada and my
former co-worker and penis wielding friend Jason and I went to The Great White
North and got hitched. We'd come back to the states, show our marriage certificate
to whomever it is within our government that you show these things to, and
wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am we'd be married in the U.S. He dies? I can tell the
undertaker to cremate him, take his cremains home, and flush him down the
toilet (per his wishes).
While I'm on my little rant, let me
just finish up my semi-defense of the Canadian government deciding to put my marriage out of its misery by
pointing out that, in at least one very important way, we (when I say
"we" I mean right minded people who think that two grown, consenting
adults should be able to marry each other regardless what combination of
reproductive organs their collectively sporting) have been dealing with this
brand of discrimination and disappointment at the exclusive hands of our own
country for years. A Same-sex couple living in Omaha, Nebraska who traveled
1900 miles to Vancouver to get married is in no better or worse shape legally
than a same-sex couple living in Alexandria, VA who drives 15 minutes into
Washington, DC and gets married there. Both imaginary couples go home, and have
no more rights than they did when they left. So, instead of getting pissed off
at the Canadian government for saying out loud what has essentially been true
all along. Let's get pissed off at our own government and demand that it repeal
DOMA. Let's keep electing democratic presidents so that maybe someday the
Supreme Court can be occupied by enough of those crazy, activist judges that
the republicans like to complain about to finally declare it illegal to refuse
marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Not just in Iowa or California, but in
all 50 state. I'd like to enter into a marriage that matters, and I don't think
that's too much to ask.
When I first turn to the first page of a book I'm starting, I get the same feeling I get when I cruise onto the highway at the beginning of a long road trip. The same feeling I get on the rare occasion I open the mailbox to find a real honest-to-god letter addressed to me. It's the feeling I get during that last hopeful moment right before I check lottery numbers. But it hasn't always been this way.
When I was in the 4th grade I was in this gifted program, and our teacher assigned us a book report. We could read anything we wanted, but I'm pretty sure the implication was that we should read something a little more advanced than Beverly Cleary. I don't remember what the other kids in my class chose to read. Probably Proust or Faulker or something of the like, but that doesn't matter because, as far as I know, none of my classmates (wonderful people, all of them) are any closer to curing cancer than I am. I say this in the literal sense. As far as I know, my classmates and I are all doing well. Successful in our own ways. But as far as changing life as we know it goes, I haven't red about any of us on the front page of The Times, in celebration of our breakthroughs in time travel. I think I was 28 when I finally realized that my 4th grade book report didn't actually fucking matter. Anyway, the point is that while my peers were off reading The Sound and the Fury I decided I would read A Wrinkle in Time, a respectable enough intermediate level, Newbury Award winning book about whatever it is that that book is about. I couldn't tell you since I never actually read it. I'm sure that, 22 years later, I have this number completely wrong, but I seem to remember being on page 17 about 2 days before the report was due. My mother, my amazing, wonderful, future-writer-of-my-book-reports mother, said that maybe I could get away with doing a report on The Velveteen Rabbit. So what if it was only 40 pages and half of them were pictures? This book was a fucking classic. I trudged through, and, since the gifted program wasn't a graded class there wasn't a thing my teacher, Mrs. Baker, could do about it.
Then, when I was 5th grade, I stupidly chose to read Hound of the Baskervilles for a book report. I say this move was stupid not because there is anything particularly wrong with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's third Sherlock Holmes novel. I haven't the first clue whether or not there's anything unappealing about the book, I didn't read it when I was 10, and I still haven't read it now that I'm 31. No, I say that my decision to read Hound of the Baskervilles for a 5th grade book report was stupid because, up until that point in my life, I'd never read anything more sophisticated than a 100 page, Matt Christopher basketball novel, so catapulting into the world of adult fiction was probably a little unrealistic. The night before the report was due, I had barely started the book. My mother, the aforementioned saint, chose to teach me a lesson about doing whatever is necessary to make sure your family is okay instead of a lesson about making sure you get your own shit done. She speed read my book, summarized it for me, then practically wrote the report herself.
I'm not sure my mother knew what to do with me at this point. Everyone on her side of the family read a book or two a week, what the hell was wrong with me? If this is starting to sound like I'm leading up to a big reveal about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia, I'm really sorry to have to disappoint you. The truth is, I was probably just exceedingly lazy, and too into Designing Women and LA Law. You know, typical 10-year-old shit.
Though my mom and I shared a love for Julia Sugarbaker's ability to cut anyone who messed with her fellow interior designers down to size, I did get the sense that she wouldn't have minded if I'd picked up a book every once in a while. She did everything she could think of to get me to read. We didn't have much money when I was growing up, but my mother never, not once, said no to me if I asked her to buy me a book. I'd watched the wonderful Wonderworks versions of The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe and Anne of Green Gables so many times that I had them memorized, so my mom bought me all 7 of the Narnia books and a beautiful, gold-leafed, illustrated version of Anne of Green Gables. I leafed through. I tossed aside. I went back to watching a coked up Drew Barrymore in the made for T.V. version of Babes in Toyland. Sure it came out when I was 5, but I had that shit on tape, and I would have rather watched it a 47th time than crack open Super Fudge. But this would soon change.
Something started happening to me around the 6th grade. No, it wasn't boobs. I got those, and all the joy that goes along with them much earlier. For one thing, I had a reading teacher, Mr. Kenny Moore, who I actually liked, which I think helped me get to the point where I could get through a whole book if someone had a gun to my head. Mr. Moore made us keep a journal about the books we were reading. We handed these in weekly so that he could make sure we were actually doing what was expected of us. I remember reading a children's illustrated version of Robinson Crusoe and writing in my journal that sometimes I wished I could be stranded on an island. Mr. Moore jotted on comment in the margin, "Why?"
This brings me to the major thing that started happening to me around the 6th grade. The thing that was way more profound than secondary sex organs. Depression Like, I had both melancholy and infinite sadness, before Billy Corgan ever even thought to shave his head. By the time I made it out of elementary school and into the 7th grade, I'd graduated from sort of passively wishing I could be on an island of my own to a full-blown, burning-tapered-candles-in-your-otherwise-dark-room-and-writing-poetry-about-corpse-souls-while-listening-to-Imagine-over-and-over-again-on-a-loop teenage angst. The last bit about John Lennon's Imagine is of particular importance.
Even though I was a devout atheist, and nonbeliever in heaven and (non-metaphorical corpse-like) souls, I had the silly little notion that I was John Lennon reincarnated. I had always loved the Beatles, but John was the individual mop head who had my heart, so I assumed, what with my being born less than a month after he was assassinated, that now, at least on a spiritual level, I had his heart too. Well, it was in the 7th grade, when my grungy angst was in bloom that I remembered something a kid named Jared said to me when were were still just 6th graders. He told me that the guy who killed John Lennon had done so because he'd read The Catcher in the Rye. Now, all I knew about the book was that I couldn't remember a time when there wasn't a copy of it in my house and that my mom liked it a lot, but since I was walking around with the victim's soul between my ears (or wherever souls are kept) I crept out of my room long enough to grab the iconic maroon and gold family copy. I read it. And fuck me, I loved it. I loved that book. I still love that book. The Catcher in the Rye is my favorite book, and even though it's a giant cliche, I'm not going to apologize for it.
The protagonist, Holden Caulfield, swears (sort of) right in the first line. The kid's a mess. He's locked up in a loony bin for Christ's sake. That scene where he's remembering talking to his sister Phoebe, and he tells her that his dream is to stand at the edge of a cliff that some kids are playing near and catch any kid that's about to go off? I think that's the first time I ever understood a metaphor. How could I not love this book? And where the hell was my Holden Caulfield to keep me from going off my cliff?
Look, I know that The Catcher in the Rye isn't the greatest book ever written. But I also know that, without that book, I'm still sitting on a couch watching Golden Girls reruns until my eyes bleed. You know what I did shortly after I read The Catcher in the Rye? I read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Then I read a little Truman Capote, and some Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. Without The Catcher in the Rye, I never take all the literature classes I can fit into my schedule at community college in Dayton, and I never meet the professor who encourages me to transfer to Ohio State to get a BA and take some writing classes. Without The Catcher in the Rye, I never move to Columbus. I never meet any of the friends I have now. I never meet Jen.
So, you can ask me tomorrow, or you can ask me 50 years from now, and the answer will be the same. My favorite book is The Catcher in the Rye. What's yours?
I'm just kidding. There is no case to be made for Rick Santorum for president. Not as far as I'm concerned. There is, however, a case I'd like to make for Rick Santorum for republican presidential nominee. It has nothing to do with a belief that he's a worthwhile candidate. In fact, it's just the opposite. I don't think there's any way in hell he could beat Barack Obama. And that's the point. Mitt Romney could beat Obama, and right now, it doesn't look like there's any chance that Romney isn't going to be the nominee. He may not appeal to the republican base, but he might just appeal to people who claim to be independents (though I feel the same way about independents as some people feel about bisexuals, which is that they don't really exist) and that's what's got me scared.
I say we let Rick Santorum gain all the momentum he can. Let him finish a respectable 2nd in New Hampshire, so that he can win in South Carolina and Florida. There is the risk that, as happened with the drawn out primary between Obama and Clinton, prolonging the seemingly inevitable nomination of Mitt Romney will only make him (Romney) a stronger candidate in the general election. That's why I'm not just talking about drawing this thing out. I'm talking about getting Rick-former-senator-from-Pennsylvania-who-lost-his-2006-reelection-by-one-of-the-widest-margins-in-U.S.-history-Santorum nominated as the republican candidate for president.
If you want Obama to be reelected, like I do, you shouldn't be telling folks that Rick Santorum wants to deny people access to any form of birth control. You should be talking up how he seems like a really sincere, and down-to-earth sort of guy. For now let's talk about his great moment at the Meet the Press/Facebook debate this morning when he was asked how he would feel if his son came to him and told him he was gay, and Santorum responded, "I wouldn't love him any less than I did the second before he said it." Then, after we get him nominated we can point out that it's doubtful any son of Rick Santorum's could ever muster the courage to tell his father he's gay given that good ol' dad once compared gay sex to "man on child, or man on dog" sex. To be fair, he was saying that gay sex isn't quite as bad as man on child or man on dog sex, but, you know, still pretty freaking close on the disgust-o-meter. And whatever you do, please wait until Mitt Romney is hiding out in one of his mansions licking his wounds, before you go ahead and point out to anyone who will listen that you're not even sure it would be constitutional to elect a muppet president.
I was on a real roll there for a while with my blog posts. Well where the hell have I been for the last month? Have I slipped back into the abyss of blogger slackerdom? How dare you suggest such a thing. Let me explain.
As most of you don't know (because, seriously, what's more boring than listening to someone talk about her New Year's resolutions?) at the start of 2011 I set a goal for myself of reading 26 books during the calendar year. To some people that probably sounds like a lot of reading. To the types of folks who are much faster readers than I, it probably sounds like I may as well have made the resolution to remember to breathe once every few seconds. For me, the only person who really matters as far as setting goals for me goes, I just wanted an achievable, realistic number. One book every two weeks or so. For a person with a job, and a genetic need to spend a few hours a week at the gym, and an unabashed willingness, if left unsupervised, to watch 25 hours of television a week, 26 books felt attainable. In the interest of full disclosure though, I am currently supervised for about 90% of my waking hours, and I really only watch about 3 hours of TV a week, most of which is Friends dvds; otherwise, I'd never have reached my goal. Oh, did I just bury the lead there? Yes, I just said I reached my goal of 26 books read in 2011. In fact, I got so into this whole, reading thing, that I couldn't stop myself and a read a few more. I'll admit, when I got to November and I realized I still had 6 books to read, I got a little twitchy. I put the blog on hold, but I filled a few pages in my little pocket notebook with blog ideas, so don't fear: there's more on the horizon. As soon as I figure out what in the hell I meant when I jotted down, "Jason Stark, Einstein hair," we'll be back in business.
If you're the sort of person who's interested in what other people read, here's the list of my 2011 books. Just to clarify, when I say "books" I mean those bound things with all the wonderful smelling pieces of paper with squiggly lines printed all over them. The ones you can hold spread open in both hands. The solid masses you can swat people with if they dare interrupt you right when you're getting to the best part. Books.
Here's a simple breakdown of what kept my eyeballs and my brainball occupied this year:
Fiction: 22
Nonfiction: 8
Male: 22
Female: 8
Memoir/Personal Essay: 6
Science/History/Biography: 2
Scandinavian Crime Fiction: 5
Rapeseed, rapeseed, my friend
We read a book for my book club that left such a bad taste in my mouth that I decided I desperately needed a literary pallet cleanser. I asked a friend if he could recommend a good mystery, and he pointed me to Scandinavian. I have no real explanation for how I ended up dedicating 1/6th of my reading efforts to Scandinavian crime fiction. They're good, but they're not that good. They were all sort of slow burns that took me longer to read than they should have given that the genre is supposed to compel you to keep going, just one more page, one more chapter, one more plot twist further. Three of the five were part of the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. The first I read of that series was Sidetracked, and once I figured out what in the hell rapeseed is (this book is full to the gills of rapeseed fields) I really enjoyed it. Mankell is considered something of a rockstar of the genre. All I know about the man I learned from Wikipedia. He's married to Ingmar Bergman's daughter, and he hates Israel. But Wallander is damaged goods with a gruff exterior and a soft, hidden underbelly. How could you not want to spend a few hundred pages with him. If you liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I don't see why you wouldn't like the Wallander books too, especially since they aren't bookended by 100 dull, tedious-to-read pages at the beginning and end of the story.
I can't believe how few books by women I read this year. I should be ashamed of myself, and I am. Having said that, easily the two best books I read this year were written by women, so stick that in your pipe. My last read read of the year was Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. You may be familiar with her without even realizing it. Perhaps you went to see the movie, The Namesake, because it stars Kal Penn from the Harold and Kumar movies. I've never seen those movies, but I'm assuming he's Kumar. I hope that doesn't make me a racist. Anyway, my point is that Jhumpa Lahiri wrote the book that the movie The Namesake, starring the guy who played Kumar (or Harold?) in the stoner flicks. Lahiri has also won a little thing called the Pulizter Prize for her first collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Sorry, I've gotten off the very important track of talking about how good Unaccustomed Earth is. It's really good. If you you enjoy character driven fiction, then it's really really good. I'd say more, but I have 20-something more books to get through, and I've already gone on and on about Kal Penn. Suffice it to say, for now, that Unaccustomed Earth might have been my favorite book of the year. Or it could just be that it's the one I read most recently. Who can say?
Either my second favorite book of the year, or my favorite book that happens to be less fresh in my mind than Unaccustomed Earth was Karen Russell's, Swamplandia!. That exclamation point is part of the title. I don't just throw those around willy-nilly. This book was fantastic! The most common way that I've described it unsolicitedly is to say that it's sort of like a The Smiths song. It's kind of fun and poppy, and then you start to pay attention to the lyrics and you realize he's singing about his girlfriend who is in a fucking coma. That's not poppy. Well the setting and the language in Swamplandia! gave me a similar feeling. What a charmingly eccentric family of alligator wrestlers dressed up as Native Americans, and selling worthless souvenirs to the mainlanders they disdain. Oh wait--the mother's died, the father has no idea what in the hell he's doing, and the protagonist has just wandered off into the swamp with a gypsy. I can see how this story might not be for everyone, so if you're on the fence, you might leaf through Russell's earlier collection of stories, St. Luce'y Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. There's a story in there called, "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," that Swamplandia! is based on.
Another common theme for me this year was reading nonfiction by people who are funny who have strong voices that I admire. If you want to be a person who writes, you should also be a person who reads. It's a wonderful way to hone your craft. It's also a wonderful way to spend 2 months not writing while still feeling self-righteous about the fact that you're working on something that you're obnoxiously snobbish enough to call, "your craft." The two best books that feel into this category this year were, Half Empty, by David Rakoff and, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, by Steve Martin.
If you've never read David Rakoff, I'd like to make a couple recommendations. First, start with one of his other books. Fraud, for example. Second, even if you're not the sort of person to do this, get the book on cd. David Rakoff is one of those people who's actual spoken voice adds something to what you're reading. If you've ever listened to David Sedaris or Sarah Vowell read their own work, you know what I'm talking about. I'm not suggesting that Half Empty isn't as good as his other books, I'm just suggesting that, since this one is largely about his experiences with his own cancer, you might want to get to know that guy first. He's dry and snarky and wonderful and I don't understand why my girlfriend, who read this book in 2 days and claimed to love it only gave it 3 stars on goodreads. Jen?
Another book that Jen only gave 3 stars, though she read it in a day, couldn't put it down, in fact, Steve Martin's, Born Standing Up, gives the best glimpse of what it must be like to slog through the early years of being a live performer or standup comic, something it's never occurred to me to try, but which I found fascinating nonetheless. Having said that, I have always been madly in love with Steve Martin, so maybe I'm not a reliable source as far as this one goes. If a book of the same theme had been written by, say, Andrew Dice Clay, I wouldn't have picked it up with rubber gloves.
I'm going to be honest with you, dear reader, I'm running out of battery power on this machine. I'm out of town, and I have no charger with me. It's the last day of the year, and I swore I would get this posted before the year was over. I'm going to finish this one up quick and dirty.
Book 26 almost killed me, and it took a year of on and off reading to get through. Jon Meacham's, American Lion, is quite good, and if you had access to unlimited amounts of Adderral or Cocaine, you could probably get through it in fewer than 9 disjointed months. I'm sure it was me. The book won the Pulitzer, and it was about a president whom I've always found fascinating. I would recommend it to anyone looking for an American History or American politics suggestion. Really, it was me, not the book.
I just scanned through the rest of the books I read in 2011, and, yeah, I think I'm good. I don't feel compelled to mention any of the others here. I did mention another of my books in a previous post. Please do check out the rest for yourself though. If you see anything you'd like to know about, you know where to find me.
