09 Nov 2012

these books are weird

I am a fan of the weird, a champion of the weird. You blog people probably know more of my weirdness than most people I know in real life, just because, well, you are also blog people so you are more attuned to the weird, but rest assured – my actual weirdness runs deeeeep. The Boy gets a lot of my weirdness, not all… pretty sure the only people who see the 100% weird are my sisters, and maybe my parents who watched me grow up so they can extrapolate.

Anyway, I was a weird kid who liked weird books for kids, and I continue to like weird books for both adults and kids.

It is saying a lot when a book out-weirds me.

So, without further ado…

Picturebooks that appear to be weird for weirdness sake:


Parrot Carrot
by Jol Temple, Kate Temple and Jon Foye

Cecil the Pet Glacier by Matthea Harvey and Giselle Potter

An allegory-based business book with a title that is both inexplicable and phallic…

Letting Go of Your Bananas by Dr. Daniel T Drubin

Hey, that reminds of another book about bananas that I weeded from a library this week.

As much as I love retro children’s lit, a library is not a Museum of Books – it is time to say goodbye to some real oldies. I looked at this book for awhile and I couldn’t figure out why I though it was so funny, silly, weird.

Then, while I was trying to Google the title of this Banana Book because I forgot it, I realized that I was probably thinking of this awful library book, which is both weird and horrifying. Maybe all books about bananas are inherently questionable?

Anyway, I digress. We will conclude with Dame Darcy’s Handbook for Hot Witches

This book would just be normal teen-nonfiction weird, but if you can read all those swirly little words on the cover, you will see that Hot Witchery includes every skill from “Love Spells,” “Glamour Tips,” and “Banjo Playing?”

Now excuse me, I need to go eat a banana and work on my love potions.

08 Nov 2012

the view from 50,000 feet

I am feeling so scatter-shot lately. My planning is half-assed, my execution is a quarter-assed, and what-exactly-am-I-doing-with-my-life-anyway?

Constantly trying to assess my predicament – am I saying “yes” too much? (Probably) Not listening to my body and my Inner Jessica (Probably). Submitting to procrastination and distraction and laziness and clutter and half-assed-ness? (Probably).

Last night, I had things to do – a social work event, a cool kid-lit event – but I was out late watching poll results the night before and away from my office all day and far from where I needed to be and even before it started snowing, I decided not to go. It felt like the right thing to do, to take a night off to recover.

It felt nice.

But sitting at home is the quickest route to feeling scatter-shot, for feeling like I’m not doing the right activity, procrastinating too much, indulging, distracting myself; when my mental game is off, free time is sometimes what I need but feels like a spotlight is shining on everything that is wrong.

But smart, happy people know that moments are moments, nights are nights, weeks are weeks; your life is more than the sum of every self-disappointment.

If I were to chart out my nights for the past few months – the feeling good nights and the feeling bad ones alike – the boxes would be filled with…

Reading books, lots and lots of them, re-reading, new reading, fiction, nonfiction, “required” and fun. Almost thirty books since August 1, while working full time, without a syllabus.

Taking care of myself and my home and my relationships and spending time with friends

Writing. Writing books, writing book reviews, writing posts, writing emails, writing good versions of all of these things, writing bad versions. Writing that feels good and writing that feels bad.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen talks about looking at your work from different perspectives, in order to keep the day-to-day and the short-term and long-term in some semblance of harmony. My day-to-day – my “runway” in GTD-speak – feels hectic, scattershot, and this is not ideal.

But that imaginary chart of my nights, the one where it looks like Jessica spends her time not worrying, procrastinating, being lazy, being messy, but writing and reading and socializing and just being a human (not a super-human)? That is what I want my life to look like.

The view from 50,000 feet is pretty okay.

 

06 Nov 2012

gone votin’

No blogging today because I’m busy getting my ass out the door early enough to go VOTE!

Hoping there aren’t any outdoor lines at the polls because it’s 31 degrees outside.

See you on the other side of this election!

05 Nov 2012

2012: week forty-three

October 28 – November 3

I have to say, in the absence of multiple jobs and assignments and school breaks, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to recall the activities on any given week.

If I was being entirely straightforward in these weekly posts, they would all be a cut-and-paste version of the following:

Wake up, make coffee in the dark, try to get warm, try to wake up, try to write.

Go to work, do work, listen to podcasts.

Come home, make dinner, watch some TV, call some people, read some books, clean some things.

In bed by 10:30.

That’s it.

And this is what I look like for most of it, because it is perpetually fah-reez-ing in my house. Brr.

Reading:

  • Books about war, being a gay teenager, and Chuck Close.
  • Smashed by Lisa Luedeke
  • Happier at Home by Gretchen Rubin

Watching:

  • Breaking Bad
  • On Sunday night, we had a highly enjoyable viewing of Hunger Games on our couch. We’ve had this couch for over a year now, and I don’t think we’ve ever sat down to just watch a movie on it, since we are perpetually on laptops and sitting at computers and in our old apartment we had a futon and a couch in the living room. HOWEVER, I just wanted to say that despite our couch’s ugliness and free-from-the-curb-ness and leather-y-ness, it is ideal for two people to lay down together and watch a movie on a Sunday night.

Listening To:

  • All sorts of Genius playlists, musical soundtracks, random Spotify CDs, and basically I am out of control. Anyone reading, please tell me what CD I should listen to, I’m running out of ideas.
03 Nov 2012

so you ran out of This American Life, vol. 2

Nine months ago, I fell down the well of Obsessive Podcast Listening. I don’t know if this is necessary correlative, but you know what? I’ve been a happier person these last nine month, and one place I get a lot of daily happiness is picking a good podcast to keep me company. I can’t quite explain what makes podcasts so wonderful, but I suspect its something about the intimacy of audio, the candid interviews, the uncensored-ness of alt-media.

When I was younger, my parents were Howard Stern fans, which I thought was bizarre, since he was rude, inappropriate, and ridiculously misogynistic.

Now I think I get it.

I shared some of my favorites back in March, but I’ve found many more podcasts to love since then. Again, I shall give all due credit to Ashley over at Writing to Reach You. She is my Patron Saint of Podcast. You can find some of her recommendations here and here.

In my last list, I was like “eh, Marc Maron.” Oh, how quickly the tides turn. I remember very distinctly some time last spring, listening to the opening monologue to Mindly Kaling episode while jogging around my school’s tiny track and thinking “Man, I wish this guy would shut up so I can get to the good part.” Now, I regularly think “Man, I wish that Marc Maron wouldn’t even have guests and would just talk to himself for a full hour.” I am a WTF with Marc Maron convert.

For the uninitiated, Marc Maron is a comedian who started performing in the 80s and 90s, but never saw particular commercial success. But what does that even mean for comedians? A half hour special on Comedy Central? A role on SNL? Who knows, but if this question is at all interesting to you, then you might like this podcast. Maron interviews comedians, musicians, and other celebrities, talking about their childhoods, their careers, and their other struggles. Conversations vary in tone and topic, but are fairly consistently engaging. Just do it.

Elizabeth and Andy Laime have another podcast, Totally Laime, that is more of the traditional “interviewing cool people” format. I listened to a few episodes, but couldn’t get into it… however, I may have to reconsider because I love-love-love their spin-off podcast, Totally Married. Elizabeth and Andy are married (duh) and in this podcast, they talk about their lives, their relationship, their past relationships, and answer relationship advice questions from listeners. I am indifferent about the advice portion, but damn if Elizabeth and Andy aren’t just terribly charming. I am obsessed with all things marriage, but I feel like much marriage-related media is focused on traditional family structures, gender roles, and expectations. Totally Married is like a peep-hole directly into the marriage of two young, creative types, which I find much more relevant and interesting.

On the JV Club, Janet Varney invites female actors, comedians, musicians, bloggers, and other media-makers, to come to her house and talk about their teenage years. I love how quickly these stories become passionate and involved – whether they are tales of great childhoods or troubled teenage-doms, there is something so intense about a teen girlhood… the story of your teen years is a powerful one.

See also: my YA obsession. Those who write for teens might find this podcast an inspiring way to remember the specificity of those complex teen stories and emotions.

Speaking of YA, Sara Zarr is a well-known, well-awarded YA author who has started a podcast of her own. This Creative Life is nothing unexpected – Sara chats with authors of all sorts (not just YA) about their writing process, how they feel about their careers, what kinds of things they value in their own creative journeys. The kind of stuff that writers and writer-wannabes love to hear about, even though they should know well enough that there’s not some “secret” of success that only the published, well-known, well-awarded authors hold. However, what makes this podcast special is that Zarr talks to her guests like they are trusted friends, colleagues, etc, and the conversations sound almost like actual phone conversations between two creative types. I don’t find these podcasts life changing, but I do find the peek into the minds of writers helps me think about my own mind in a similar way.

And now for something entirely different… Doug Loves Movies! Comedian Doug Benson invites comedians and actors to join in many movie-related games in front of a live audience, and records the podcast. The games are silly party games – name that movie, string together movie titles, I can’t really explain this very well so I am going to stop. The “contestants” are sometimes very good and sometimes very bad. But what is most impressive is the star-power that Doug can convince to come play games – if you ever are in the mood for a light, “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” kind of podcast but starring Judd Apatow, Aziz Ansari, or Anna Kendrick, then you might like Doug Loves Movies.

02 Nov 2012

Tuberculosis, Wes Moore, and Frederick Douglass

Invincible Microbe: Tuberculosis and the Never-Ending Search for a Cure by Jim Murphy and Alison Blank

One of my favorite qualities of nonfiction for kids and teens is that the authors are never allowed to be too narrow. Some readers may come to a book with background knowledge on the topic, but most don’t – they need a little more context. Good nonfiction authors, I’ve found, do more than do a little info-dump at the beginning of the book; they simply broaden the discussion to give a cultural and historical background, weaving in specific information as they go.

Murphy and Blank are such authors. I have never been more interested in pathology than when reading Invincible Microbe. The best part, I thought, was the sometimes painful, always weird details of what passed for TB treatments over the years: starving, bleeding, rolling everyone’s beds out on the porch to sleep – all fair game! You will never be more thankful for modern medicine, and, at the same time, more horrified that tuberculosis is still a rising problem around the world.

 

Abraham Lincoln & Frederick Douglass: The Story Behind an American Friendship

by Russell Freedman

I have a well-known histori-crush on Abraham Lincoln, but Frederick Douglass ain’t no slouch. Ever read his autobiography? That’s some tough stuff. Anyway, these two men are quite well-known and much biographed, but Freedman manages to provide a compelling little dual-biography by focusing on the qualities and interests that the two figures shared. However, I did not know that these two men had a few encounters, and while “friendship” might be a stretch – they only met a handful of times – they obviously had a great respect for each other, a respect that was racially crazy for the time. I really enjoyed this book

Discovering Wes Moore by Wes Moore

Aaaaand speaking of unlikely friendships, this guy Wes Moore  met a guy with the same name who grew up in the same neighborhood as he did. While Wes Moore #1 became an “author, businessman, and US Army veteran,” Wes Moore #2 received a life sentence for murdering a policeman. At some point, the cops came to Wes Moore #1’s parents house looking for dirt on Wes Moore #2; later, Wes Moore #1 decided to mail Wes Moore #2 a letter, and they developed a friendship. How interesting.

Maybe Wes Moore’s book for adults, The Other Wes Moore is more of a reflection on this interesting friendship… but the juvenilized version, Discovering Wes Moore, is all childhood memoir, all Wes Moore #1 looking back at how his Mom raised him right, family made sacrifices, how he acted like a dumb little kid most of the time but learned from mistakes and became a man, etc etc etc. The Wes Moore #1 meets Wes Moore #2 bit is kept to the final chapter, reserving the rest for good old fashioned Lesson Teaching.

Ahem.

01 Nov 2012

this is what happened during Sandy

1. I sat around for most of the day thinking “Why in the world is this my SECOND hurricane in just barely over 3 years in Boston?” Not to mention the earthquake, the tornado, the blizzard… did I accidentally move into Life As We Knew It?

2. The Boy and I were both granted days off of work. I would say it’s sometimes nice to be a civil servant, but this city pretty much shut the heck down.

3. I read a book:

It wasn’t great, but I need to review it, so it felt nice to get things done.

4. …because most of the day, I played The Sims. Urgh.

5. I also did the dishes and vacuumed and put away my laundry, so that is worth something.

6. I checked the weather report, the news, and the view outside my window often. It was windy and somewhat rainy and my house creaked a lot.

7. Mass amounts of kitty cuddles

8. I roasted a chicken.

9. I watched Call the Midwife

9. I worried for my friends and folks in NJ and NY.

10. I got terribly indignant when The Boy earned a second day at home, and thus left him the dinner dishes, and also thus won Future Wife of the Year.

11. In the morning, we discovered that a branch broke our car’s windshield… a car that we were about to take to the shop to determine if it was driveable, and even without a broken windshield, we can’t afford to fix it/it’s more than the car is worth. Le sigh. C’est la vie. Something else French.

30 Oct 2012

happy hunger games


Happy Halloween! I still hate you, Halloween, as a holiday, but let’s raise a pumpkin-flavored drink to…

  • Costumes that are free
  • Costumes that can be thrown together in a few hours or less
  • Costumes that ultimately consist of me wearing my black workout clothes with my favorite boots on top
  • Costumes that are children’s lit-based
  • Costumes that are beard-based
29 Oct 2012

2012: week forty-two

October 21 – October 27

I finally got a new computer and my sister was so kind as to mail me a special, special package.

Friends, after three years away, The Sims 3 is back in my life.

All I did this week was create a family, accidentally raise 6 children from birth to adult (I was aiming for 5 but had some surprise twins), rise through a business and culinary career, remodel the house, send two kids to boarding school, and take a vacation to Egypt.

Aka, all shirk every duty I had and sit at the computer and play.

What a good week.

Reading:

Watching:

  • Mad Men, Mad Men, Mad Men

Listening To:

  • I’m out of good CDs to listen to, so I’m turning to WXPN’s 2011 Top 50 list again. Listened to Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and some Paul Simon.
  • Finally got around to listening to author Sara Zarr’s This Creative Life podcast, about writing. Quite enjoyable, although I wish the audio quality was better.
27 Oct 2012

links i love

The Anxious Idiot

I am someone who suffers from a lot of free-floating anxiety. Maybe I’m diagnosable, maybe I’m not, but in order not to curl up into a ball and die, I sometimes have to focus really intently on separating feelings of anxiety from my intellectual knowledge of what those feelings are and how they act on my body. Daniel Smith writes this piece for a NY Times blog that hits the nail on the head – anxious people are fundamentally idiots, with the term defined as “an impractical and unreasonable person, a person who tends to forget all the important lessons, essentially a fool, one who willfully ignores all that he has learned about how to come to his own aid.” Word.

 

Straight White Male is the Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

This is an article about race! Well-known genius, author Jon Scalzi, presents a shockingly straightforward metaphor for American race relations targeted at those who are most likely to misunderstand American race relations and the concept of privilege. You probably need a basic understanding of video games to get the full effect, but this is what I wish all cultural analysis was written like.

 

Boston From the Red Line

There is a part of the Boston subway that crosses from Boston to Cambridge via a bridge over the Charles River. It is perhaps my favorite part of Boston; when I was interning and taking class and working and exhausted, I woke myself up every morning from my red line snooze to take in the view. The creator of this site seems to agree – and he/she has an iPhone. 

 

Eight Hours of Sleep and Two Cups of Coffee

My favorite Ashley from Writing to Reach You talks about something that – as you might have noticed – has really consumed my thoughts for the past few years – exactly HOW do you remain a functional, productive, healthy human being? Ashley’s post is a bit more personal/nuanced, but Eight Hours of Sleep and Two Cups of Coffee is about as close to a life’s mantra as I have. Since my life has settled down and I’ve been eating nothing but meat and veggies and olive oil, I’ve been getting more sleep and sometimes not needing Cup #2, which is a great development, I think, but yes, this post hit home as I, too, am readjusting to a certain level of self-awareness that Crazy-Schedule-Jessica was not allowed.

Celebrate Nothing and Everything

I am a fan of non-holiday-related celebrations. Sometimes I neglect to inform those that should be celebrating with me, say, the last day of school, and then those that should be celebrating with me go out for drinks with coworkers and come home after 9 p.m., leaving me alone all evening in a decided state of non-celebration, but that is certainly a communication failing on my part, not a reason to skip random celebrations. The 20-Nothings blog has a great list of random celebrations to add to your life.

 

 

Scholastic’s Great Idea: The Legacy of the Babysitter’s Club

The Atlantic writes a little ode to a children’s literature bastion that was The Babysitter’s Club. Starting with the awkward tales of Karen Brewer in the Babysitter’s Little Sister junior series and moving on as I aged up a few years, the BSC was most definitely my multivolume, uber-packaged children’s series of choice. This article is sensitive and comprehensive; I especially liked the bit about how  young Scholastic intern David Levithan (see: Every Day) was charged with keeping The Babysitter’s Club Bible. I wonder how many pages of this tome was dedicated to keeping track of Claudia Kishi’s many outrageous outfits.

Kid Lit Election 2012

I am completely over Presidential election coverage. However, if Charlotte A. Cavatica was running against Jamie Kincaid, I would be glued to the screen. The clever folks at Horn Book have crafted this entertaining series that is distracting me from actual politics. Scroll back through the tag archives for the Democratic and Republican primaries.

10 Things I Never Learned in Library School

There are probably a billion of posts with this title on the interwebs – Library School is a strange beast of a professional program with questionable correlation to the actual profession.

However, this post is not about professional critique. This is about crazy things that happen in libraries. I’m sure many other jobs have laundry lists of strange happenings, but I am not sure that any happenings could be stranger than library happenings.

What To Read? 20 Book Club Recommendations

Holy treasure-trove of books! Janssen of Everyday Reading posted this mega-list of discussion-friendly, fairly-easy-to-obtain, relatively-contemporary titles to suggest to your book club. I went to a work-people book club last month (we read this ridiculous book), and while I am more excited about this month’s selection, this still does not feel book-clubby enough for me… maybe not enough baked goods, wine, and wearing my pajamas? I don’t know why I envision myself wearing pajamas at a book club… nonetheless I may be inclined to enact some sort of ChL Survivors Drunk Book Club/Pajama Party soon, and maybe I will yank a suggestion from this excellent list.