2012 discovery

A blog entitled:  ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS

(1)  Typing in all caps never gets old.  Emulating some sort of voice immodulation disorder/lack of volume control over the computer is such a hoot y'all.  Particularly when I look up at my screen and I've accidentally drafted three lines of an email to my boss virtually screaming.  Gosh what a crack.

(2)  Animals talking is just funny.

Here's a clip:

I ASKED FOR A VEGETARIAN OPTION, NOT A SMORGASBOARD OF SIDE DISHES! CAN I GET A PROTEIN? SOME FUCKING QUINOA? ANYTHING REMOTELY ROBUST? THANKS FOR DOUBLING UP THE GARNISH BUT I DON’T ACTUALLY EAT ROSEMARY. IT’S 2012! CAN WE PLEASE JUST GET OUR SHIT TOGETHER? GO TO GRAMERCY TAVERN! GO TO PER SE! TAKE SOME NOTES! THIS IS RIDICULOUS! AND WHERE THE HELL IS MY WINE? WHAT PAIRS WELL WITH COMPLETE AND UTTER DISAPPOINTMENT? I’LL HAVE TWO GLASSES OF THAT WHENEVER YOU GET A CHANCE! 

Everyone enjoy their evening while I send these geniuses seasonal pictures of the tiny sheriff.

Night y'all. 

xx

2012: More lit please.

Gosh y'all it's been so long since I've reviewed a book I barely remember what I read!  And to state the sad truth, it hasn't been much the second half of 2011.  My work schedule, Junior League schedule, and attending a wedding about every month (including MOH-ing in one! Mazel little sister!) made it a challenge to dive into a good book in the off time, not to mention I spend quite a bit of off time whispering sweet nothings to my mang if you catch my drift.  Gosh what a crazy, tragic, sometimes almost magic, awful, beautiful year (Just took it there with some country lyrics.  I really do need to amp up the literature in my life.).

Some very brief highlights and lowlights from my reading adventures since we've last sipped and swirled together:

Bram Stoker's Dracula was a true 2011 highlight.  My classics ladies (Teri, Jackie, Biscuit and I) have had a small haitus only partially due to the birth of little Sofie Kay- the cutest little honorary book club member you could imagine- but we did manage to fit in this gem.  Stoker's narrative story-telling is smooth, though sometimes endless, and he builds suspense, plants fear and tickles curiosity in this gothic, romantic horror story.  It's a festive fall read and one of the few page-turners of its time (the UK in the 1800s was a snooze fest folks).

William Thackeray's Vanity Fair.  See snooze-fest comment above.  Friends, this book confirms that any author who was paid by the word a la Charles Dickens just is not the man for me.  If you had a few inches left in your suitcase to a deserted island for the rest of your life and had to choose between a copy of Vanity Fair and four stale hotdog buns, I'd have to flip for it.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

"The Glass Castle" By Jeannette Walls.  Best read of 2011.  Now usually the New York Times Bestseller List is a cesspool of complete malarkey, but the exceptions can be exceptional.  This dysfunctional 2005 memoir is complete nonfiction, yet so sensational it rocks the conscience.  Jeannette's parents are so negligent, you can barely forgive them, yet their own lessons on forgiveness are so remarkable and child-like that you wonder how these thoughts could reside in the parents who could  provide nothing but a poverty-stricken, unstable and tragic childhood for their kids.

"Erma can't let go of her misery," Mom said.  "It's all she knows."  She added that you should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies.  "Everyone has something good about them," she said.  "You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that."

"Oh yeah?" I said.  "How about Hitler?  What was his redeeming quality?"

"Hitler loved dogs," Mom said without hesitation.

And those are a few remarks of 2011, along with a taste of my first 2012 read, "The Thirteenth Tale" by Diane Setterfield:

"People disappear when they die.  Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath.  Their flesh.  Eventually their bones.  All living memory of them ceases.  This is both dreadful and natural.  Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation.  For in the books they write they continue to exist.  We can rediscover them.  Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods.  Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy.  They can comfort you.  They can perplex you.  They can alter you.  All this, even though they are dead.  Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic."

So see y'all for more reading in 2012.  xx

Waiting for Superman

10-miler in Baltimore, a great weekend in sunny MD with my sweet mang, and I'm back in DC with a few pounds too many of pita chips in my belly (somebody please break into my apartment and hold me up at gunpoint to steal this damn bag!), and watching a documentary about 2 years late.

Waiting for Superman- a candid look at the shortfalls of our public school system, told through the eyes of hard-up folks who want their kids to have a better life, but don't have the choice of plugging them into a private school.

Allow me to corroborate a few of Geoffrey Canada's most salient points...

Tenure was originally designed as a protection for academia at the university level.  The intention was to protect speech in an academic setting: not to allow the administration du jour to affect post-secondary research and curriculum with a political or personal agenda. To translate the idea of tenure into a primary and secondary education-level protection is completely erroneous.  Please tell me what constitutional speech is threatened in second grade, when we're learning adverbs?  Or when high schoolers are learning calculus (those of them who still reach that level these days)?  As a matter of fact, I'm pretty comfortable with those teachers being told what to say and being granted only the discretion of how to say it.  There will always be provocative issues in the public school system - evolution, banned books, political history - but these things are not protected through tenure, they're issues that are legislated or set by regulation! 
I've been party to discussions among new teachers, sharing just how nervous they are that they may not be "asked back" next year.  Guess what folks- that's a great thing!  When I worked at my old law firm, I was conscious of every work product I handed my boss, because I knew that if I handed him anything less, he could have someone smarter than me sitting in my chair tomorrow morning.  Cue in Ayn Rand's personal challenge to live up to your potential please.  It's not a back-breaking exercise, and that goes for whether you're arguing cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, or whether you're pushing a broom in the bathroom.  It's not about being a superstar, it's about taking some ownership and doing a decent job.

We need national standards for our 50 states.  And we need less bureaucracy, which would naturally accompany thoughtful national standards were they implemented correctly.  The problem is there are so few self-starters in the federal and even state governments because they can be, in my opinion, lazy-bum factories.  And heaven forbid we expect our Congress to produce meaningful legislation between reelections!

Now I'm not trying to criticize all teachers.  I think they get paid too little and they deserve tons more appreciation and recognition than they get now - good teachers, that is.  The system is flawed, and as in any other federal government setting, people who attempt to turn it upside down realize quickly their hands are tied with federal employment protections, unions, tenure, and a litany of other superfluous, destructive forms of job guarantees.  That's not how this country became a superpower, but it just may be how this country cripples itself in its own red tape.

Book Review: Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

If you read Life of Pi and loved it like I did, then do yourself a favor and:

1.  Buy this book;

2.  Read nothing about it online- none of the critic reviews and especially none of the plot summaries;

3.  Get a box of tissues and keep an open mind; and

4.  Enjoy another Yann Martel animal allegory, as painful as this one may be.

And those are both my review and recommendation bundled into four tidy directions.  I don't want to hint at themes or touch upon turning points; I want you to experience them on your own.  I had a hint of what was to come and I found myself waiting for it the entire read, which is no way to wander through Martel's carefully crafted mix of reality and fantasy.

"It's so hard to talk about it. It hurt, it was painful -- that's all there is to say about it, really. But to feel it! We recoil from he flame of a single match, and here I was in the middle of a blaze. And still it wasn't over." ~ Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil

Book Review: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd's 2002 best seller, "The Secret Life of Bees," is a tale of 14 year-old Lily Owens and her search for her late mother's past.  After fleeing from her abusive father aside Rosaleen, her family's maid, she serendipitously stumbles upon the home of May, June and August - three black sisters who manufacture honey in South Carolina.  Lots of strong female characters, lots of racial tension, and a little bit of southern Civil Rights Act-era American history.

This book was almost a mixture between The Help (which I swear I've reviewed but can't seem to find my write up right now)  and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  Thankfully more of the former, as we all know I can't say enough about how much I disliked Guernsey.  The Secret Life of Bees was sprinkled with slightly-too-silly moments that rang of the Guernsey characters' giggly traditions and ceremonies- very red hat society and devoid of meaning and creativity.  But aside from some silly hats and a few weird chain gang reenactments, Kidd's themes were sincere and her story was a quick, lighthearted summer trip to the land of honey and cotton. 

I'll leave you with Lily's first taste of love as a young girl:

"The whole time we worked, I marveled at how mixed up people got when it came to love.  I myself, for instance.  It seemed like I was now thinking of Zach forty minutes out of every hour, Zach, who was an impossibility.  That's what I told myself five hundred times:  impossibility.  I can tell you this much:  the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love."*

*Now to be honest I'm not sure what "fires of love" are aflame at the ripe age of 14...

Life's a West Palm Beach

Greetings darlings - checking in live from sunny West Palm Beach where I'm relaxing, reading, sipping...err WORKING. Curiously stumbled across this gem on my wanders after a day of Florida's clean energy policy:

(Sloane's Ice Cream and Candy Bar in downtown West Palm)

Savored some delectable oatmeal raisin ice cream.  Raisins + ice cream = two of my favorite things.  Let's face it -- you could put raisins in damn near anything and I'd eat them.  Enjoying the travel time to catch up on my much-neglected personal reading list.  Here's a sweet treat for y'all tonight from my current read:

I lay back and tried to invent a story about why my mother had owned a black Mary picture.  I drew a big blank, probably due to my ignorance about Mary, who never got much attention at our church.  According to Brother Gerald, hell was nothing but a bonfire for Catholics.  We didn't have any in Sylvan -- only Baptists and Methodists -- but we got instructions in case we met them in our travels.  We were to offer them the five-part plan of salvation, which they could accept or not.  The church gave us a plastic glove with each step written on a different finger.  You started with the pinkie and worked over to the thumb.  Some ladies carried their salvation gloves in their purse in case they ran into a Catholic unexpectedly.

The only Mary story we talked about was the wedding story -- the time she persuaded her son, practically against his will, to manufacture wine in the kitchen out of plain water.  This had been a shock to me, since our church didn't believe in wine or, for that matter, in women having a lot of say about things.  All I could really figure was my mother had been mixed up with the Catholics somehow, and -- I have to say -- this secretly thrilled me.  ~ Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

The Spy Who Loved Me

Our favorite saucy spy is back y'all.  That's right- Valerie Plame has been double-crossed, taken the high road with some decent memoirs (highly recommend Fair Game if you're curious about all things CIA), dipped her toe into Hollywood waters when her memoirs became a (pretty mediocre) movie, and now she's just signed a deal with Penguin Group USA to write a series of international suspense novels.

(Remember this hot little Vanity Fair number?)

Good for Val.  Given how she and 'ol Joe Wilson kept squeaking about how they didn't have a pot to piss in after and during the whole ordeal, hopefully this means she's banking beyond her wildest dreams and upgrading to granite countertops in her adobe abode.  She may be a little overexposed these days, but Val is a solid citizen and a fearless broad who actually keeps her roots done.

x