I'm enjoying a childless afternoon, thanks to the in-laws, at the Tattered Cover in Highland's Ranch. I've got my cup of coffee, my half of a ginormous chocolate-chunk cookie (because there are no calories if you split it with someone else), a stack of cooking magazines from which I am surreptitiously copying down promising recipes (I don't mind buying magazines, but I hate storing them), a comfy chair, and air conditioning. Tomorrow, the whole hectic cycle of teaching, childcare, and chauffeuring starts over again, but for the first time in a long time, I'm completely relaxed. It takes so little to make me happy.
Speaking of cooking and free recipes, I made this Talerine "Beef" Casserole last night (I used ground turkey and about 1/2 the cheese), and it turned out pretty yummy. Luke didn't eat it, of course, but that would have been nothing short of miraculous. Thank god for Whole Foods Unidentifiable Yet Organic Frozen Chicken Parts. I love the Simply Recipes blog; everything I've made has been wonderful, and Elise posts a nice mix of recipes, none with outrageous instructions or ingredients. Between her blog and the wonderful Epicurious database (and my current unscrupulous bookstore transcriptions), I hardly ever haul out my old cookbooks anymore.
I'm ABD in English Literature. That means that if I got off my butt and wrote my dissertation, I could get my PhD and possibly teach at a university. I'd have a higher salary and fewer classes, and I'd actually get to talk about books instead of the importance of thesis statements and proper comma usage.
But even if I had the time, I don't have the mental energy. When I tried to write for an hour or two in the evenings, I'd spend most of my time rewriting the same 15 pages over and over again. I couldn't develop my argument, and I kept getting bogged down in my prose. Eventually, everything stopped making sense, and I haven't even opened the file since I had my younger child.
One of the reasons I put the dissertation away, besides the futility of the endeavor, was that I started to hate reading. When I was a lonely nerd throughout kindergarten through middle school, books got me through each day. I actually got in trouble in 6th grade for reading too much. And I would reread my favorites over and over again, to the point where I could almost quote them. I've always thought that my success in my English classes was due less to any natural talent and more to my unconscious aping of the prose that I'd read. Considering some college students still can't recognize what makes a complete sentence, I could see how I stood out for my teachers.
But eventually, I just ran out of things that I wanted to read. Before grad school, I had the desire to be "well-read" and tried to fill in any gaps accordingly. But the exams and classes of grad school have both given me the illusion that I have read everything "serious" and have killed the desire to read anything that takes too much mental focus. But I also can't read bad writing any more, or at least mediocre prose. Some of my friends take guilty pleasure in "chick-lit." I tried a few of the books and quickly grew tired of the formula. The speculative fiction I like, I love, but most sci-fi and fantasy bores me. And anything Oprah touches, I want nothing to do with. Some contemporary fiction, I absolutely love (The Time Traveler's Wife, for example, or The Cloud Atlas), but I seem to find maybe two titles a year like these, if I'm lucky. And I no longer have the patience to read anything unless I really enjoy it.
So I went back to my childhood habits. Cory Doctorow's review of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy encouraged me to pick them up, and they started me on a young adult kick. I had almost forgotten the sensation of sitting down with a book and not getting up until I was done (because I wanted to, not because I had a paper due the next day). The stakes in young adult fiction seem so much higher, and while they're simpler, from an adult perspective, the earnestness with which the characters wrestle with them recalls the drama of teen-aged life perfectly. (Do you wrestle with stakes? It's probably a good thing I'm not a PhD.).
Westerfeld's trilogy takes place in a dystopian future society, where children are isolated from adults during their preteen and early teenage years. When they turn 16, they get surgically modified to be "pretty," their features tailored to the exact measurements that appeal to our evolutionary predilections. The rationale is supposedly that if everyone looks perfect, then no one gains or loses status from their appearance. There's no discrimination, no "lookism," no eating disorders, no low self-esteem (or "self of steam," as one of my students once wrote). Pretties live in dorms and spend their days in a perfectly controlled environment of endless parties. Nobody wants for anything, no one has any responsibilities, and no one leaves the city.
The heroine, Tally, can't wait for her sixteenth birthday and her surgery, but before that happens, she makes friends with Shay, a girl who is curious about the larger world. When Shay flees with a band of unmodified outsides, Tally is blackmailed into finding her by a group of terrifying, genetically enhanced "Specials"; if she doesn't cooperate, she stays ugly for the rest of her life. I won't spoil what exactly she discovers in the process, but you've probably guessed that the pretty world is not as benign as it seems.
Westerfeld is obviously exploring common teenage concerns of conformity and individuality, of the connection between our appearance and our identities, but the books never feel like heavy-handed allegory, and he never dumbs the prose down. Tally reads like a real teenager, but she's also an identifiable character, never a prat that you want to smack out of her angst. And I love a good dystopia, from the description of the perfect society to the inevitable exposing of the flaws. It's kind of like David Foster Wallace's essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" about going on a cruise, where he gets to indulge in a luxurious artificial environment and then dismantle the illusion so you don't feel so bad about not being there.
I don't miss being a teenager. Hell no. I was miserable and bored most of the time. But I do miss the escapism that I found in books when I was younger. It's hard to shut off my brain now - grocery list, doctors visits, meetings, playdates, finances, all these concerns prevent me from getting away from my quotidian reality. But good young adult fiction is not only easy to read, but it makes me feel like a young reader myself, and it allows me to suspend the world for a while. It's good to be a teenager again, especially if that teenager is not my former self. As an adult, I no longer desperately long for another life, but I appreciate the brief respites that these books can provide.
I'm at work today, advising students, grading papers, and trying to think of a way to stretch a few random thoughts into a two hour lecture on The Tempest tonight. I spent yesterday trying to clean for a relative's visit and looking after two cranky small creatures who would not believe me when I claimed that a nap would solve all their attitude problems. I have insomnia something fierce and wasted two hours early this morning reloading metafilter and playing solitaire. I am exhausted, trying to get used to a larger family while fitting a full-time job (5/5 comp course load, plus committee work) in part-time hours so I can stay at home with the urchins and somehow guide their development while lying exhausted on the floor.
In gmail this morning, the customized text ad above my inbox read "Are you a Slacker Mom?"
Fuck you, google.
Soda? Cola? Pop? What do you say? Any other regional words that set you apart?
Question submitted by Gladys.
If we were referring to any carbonated sugar drink (be it Coke, Tab, or, since I grew up in North Carolina, Cheerwine!), we would say "coke," as in "Wanna get a coke?" We would not, however, then proceed to order a "Sprite-Coke" or a "Pepsi-Coke" - we weren't idiots. We knew the identification value of brand names. But I didn't hear "pop" or "soda" until I moved out of the South, and those terms still sound weird to my ears. Pop is a noise; soda's what you mix with Scotch.
I took Luke to his first movie-theater movie this morning. My mother-in-law had tried to take him to see Curious George last year, but on the way into the mall theater, they were surrounded by ads for Ice Age II, and Luke became too terrified to go any further. He's a strange little guy - he can watch virtual dinosaurs tear each other to bits, and he was disappointed when I couldn't find a Finding Nemo cake that showed the barracuda eating Nemo's family, but the grotesque really disturbs him. Case in point, he's currently enjoying the Toy Story movies, and the parts that had him hiding behind the couch weren't the mean kid's Frankentoys or Woody's nightmare about being smothered by dismembered arms. No, he was scared of the cute rubber aliens. Because they have three eyes. Three eyes is bad. So, the google-eyed Ice Age characters gave him the creeps.
It sounds like I let my kids watch too much TV. Honestly, I don't. Well, maybe I do. At least they won't grow up to be one of those insufferable prats who brag about how they family didn't have a television, and that's why they don't get every other reference you make.
Anyway, we went to see the relatively harmless Cars, which was not my favorite Pixar film to date but, being Pixar, was ten times better than most other movies being made today, especially those for kids. I let Luke pick out the candy - a gargantuan bag of Skittles - and combined with the popcorn that I felt was necessary for the first movie experience, the kid was ready to hurl about 30 minutes into the film. He asked to go home several times in the middle of the film, usually when the cars were having meaningful conversations, but I made us stay - I felt like it was important to impress upon him that this wasn't a video, dammit, but an outing that you need to commit to until the end. As Steve's mom told me later, I'm lucky he didn't throw up all over me.
His reaction to the film was lukewarm, but he's used to seeing movies over and over again, and for most films, he really only starts to enjoy them once he knows them well enough to predict every scene. And the movie did have some slow periods. But he was very confused with the previews, and I had a hard time explaining some of the pre-movie "entertainment" (which went on for 25 minutes) to him. Why does Cinemark insist on showing its logo on the screen for a few minutes while it appears to be underwater? Why are the Fanta girls so loud and scary? Why are the deer and the bear blowing up cars? Can we see the cars blow up again?
He said he would go back with me again to see another movie. I hope he starts to enjoy the process more. I never see movies in the theater anymore. I used to be a huge film-buff, but I haven't been interested in most of the movies that have come out in the past, oh, six years or so, and the titles I do want to see, I usually can wait until they're on video. But watching Luke experience the size and the "grandeur," cloying and fake though it was, was wonderful. I love seeing him discover things that I've long taken for granted.
But there is no way in hell I'm taking him to see that Ashton Kutcher-voiced deer movie.
