Very short reviews of a few things

The Lorax is a far better movie than you might imagine. The songs are brilliant, the animation is excellent, and it's got Betty White. I think it's true to Seuss's vision, too.

I often do not like spiced teas very much, but I very much like the Christmas blend from Tin Roof Teas. I am normally very skeptical about statements like this, but: I am starting to think it's just that I don't like spiced teas I can get at the grocery store.

I did not very much like the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice when I first saw it. I was all, "Keira Knightley is no Lizzie Bennett!" and I was annoyed at all of the smoldering and the lack of humor. I still feel that way a bit, but last night I watched the end of it again, and you know, it's a lovely movie. It's very slow and pretty and the guy who plays Darcy isn't all bad, and the Jane is actually better than the Jane from my favorite version, which is the BBC miniseries. However, Colin Firth will always be my favorite Darcy, and Jennifer Ehle has a sardonic, cool edge that Knightley lacks and needs for playing Lizzie.

Endless Alphabet is the best iPad app we ever bought for Henry. The Toca Boca apps are also fantastic.

That is all.

"There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later."

--Books v. Cigarettes, George Orwell (found at Breathing Books)

I miss language. I used to be the sort of person who memorized quotes, songs, and poems. I once had a friend with whom I could have conversations composed entirely of lyrics. I kept a list (online, even!) of everything I read, and I was so very pleased with it, even though I never did come up with a rating system. My major in college was linguistics, and one of my minors was French, and along the way I took a lot of philosophy and literature courses, all in the service of my love of language.

Somewhere along the way, my reading habits changed. I still read a lot, particularly for the mother of a toddler, but at some point I stopped being the kind of person who would randomly pick up a book of letters or poetry and joyfully, slowly browse to being the kind of person who plows through books like bowls of popcorn. I have such a hard time slowing down to appreciate what I’m reading on any level other than that of the story, and that makes me sad.

I’d say I’ve regressed, but hell, even when I was a child and teenager, I would write quotes down and tape them to my bedroom wall, just because the language pleased or tickled me. Sure, it was mostly Darkwing Duck and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy up there, but these quotes stuck in my mind due to the way they were said, the language used. As I was watching The Grinch this Christmas, I recalled how I loved the ridiculous names of all of the toys as a child and wanted to write them all down and memorize them. Most of what I read these days does not stick. Romances, in particular, all blur together in my head. I will defend them, and I will keep on reading them, but I will never claim that I am reading them for the lovely language and not for the ever-present romantic tension. The language in my chosen romances is not bad—I’d probably have a hard time reading them if it was—but it is only scaffolding for story and character, and not special in itself.

It’s not that I never read anything but romance. I do. It’s that I don’t savor what I am reading, or at least if I do, I only manage once in a great while, little glimpses of wonder that keep me trying.

I am forever deciding that it’s time I started reading more classics*, and as I’ve thought about my resolutions while leading up to this New Year’s Day, I have been wondering why I am so obsessed with this idea. I am often uncomfortable with this drive, because I feel like it has a little bit to do with what I think of as bourgeois-esque academic striving, and that’s not a motivation that feels comfortable to me.

As I pick apart my reasoning, though, I can recognize that my motivations are complicated, and a strong reason to read more highbrow literature is so I can find more beautiful language, language that really resonates with me and helps me get a little bit clearer on who I am.

And that’s really what this is about, isn’t it: Remembering a part of myself that I miss, but also getting back to figuring out who I am, particularly in the context of this life with my family, because I think, no matter the reason, it was about when I got serious with Melissa that my luxurious reading slowed down. It’s possible it had to do with that slight shuffling of self that happens when you are mingling your life with someone else’s, but this should not have gotten lost in the shuffle.

This stuff, it’s a form of prayer for me. Careful reading, my love of words, is one of the ways I tap into the loveliness of being alive and human and part of the world around me. Stories are another way, but I am pretty sure I can never lose that, even if I tried.

All of this said, I have two resolutions for the year ahead. One, I am going to read five books from this list. Two, I am going to keep a careful list of everything I read, rather than (possibly in addition to) using Goodreads. Goodreads is all well and good, but I want something I own. It might be a private document, or I might stick it online somewhere. If I do, I'll come back here and link it.

How about you? What are your plans for the next year? Tell me what you're going to read.

*And I never get very far, though I do try. In the past year or two, I’ve read about half of Don Quixote, a handful of the Federalist Papers, a bit of Herodotus, and various portions of non-fiction books that aren’t classics but do have to do with economics. I did manage to finish How to Read a Book in my 30 minute portions, which I find somewhat hilarious.

Being a Mom (Part 1 of god knows)

Earlier today I tweeted that my working mother guilt is at an all-time high, but “guilt” is not the right word. It’s sadness. It’s that I am sad that I have to send my child to daycare, and today I am sadder than I usually am.

For whatever reason, Henry has become more affectionate, particularly to people who aren’t Melissa. I suddenly have a little boy who wants to cuddle, who wants to hold my hand when I’m walking next to the stroller, and who wants to ride in the car with me when I’m just running out to pick up pizza. This change has brought me a world of joy, but it means that I also have a little boy who does not want to be parted from me when it’s time to go to school in the morning.

When I say that I am sad, I mean that it hits me in the gut when I see that one of his trains is parked on a windowsill in the dining room, that I fight back tears when I see someone at the library with two children about the size Henry is right now.

I am also confused, because this is one of those things that messes with my sense of self. I was at the library to drop off a couple of books and, as is usual for me, I stepped inside for a few minutes to wander around and see if any books caught my eye. As I was wandering, today, I thought about that fifteen minutes or so and how I could be spending it with Henry. Well, not that particular fifteen minutes, as he was almost certainly napping, but that fifteen minutes could be used to do work that I wouldn’t be doing later, so I could go pick him up fifteen minutes earlier than I might have.

Who am I, if I don’t occasionally wander through shelves, looking at books?

Who am I other than Henry’s mother?

That sounds like a nice, pat response, a clear answer, but am I a good parent without a sense of self? It’s not just about fifteen minutes. It’s about taking another fifteen to write this. It’s about quality of time spent, whether it’s with Henry or without him. It’s probably about not playing games on my phone, if I’m honest.

I’m still not really sure what I’m doing, as a mom. I still need to learn about things other than “attention and time spent fills him up and makes him happy.” I know that I do.

It’s not easy to integrate all of this love into my life, I guess I’m saying, but oh man, it’s so great to have this big thing trying to fit itself into my time. Oh, man, I am so lucky. Today I’m just lucky and a little extra sad.

Farmer's Market Week

Food is the one budget item that makes both Melissa and myself feel a little woozy when we look at our spending trends on Mint. Melissa’s threshold is a lot lower than mine, but when I see us occasionally spending $1200 a month or more on food, it makes me feel sick, too. We’ve approached this problem in many different ways—making a meal plan for the week works the best—but when life gets very busy or stressful, we almost always slide back into old habits of eating out too much and not being creative with the ingredients we have on hand, therefore also going to the grocery store too often.

Last weekend I went to the farmer’s market and ran into a friend who said, “Yeah, we do most of our grocery shopping here.” This re-ignited a fantasy of mine, a fantasy that was recently fueled by the book An Everlasting Meal, a fantasy where we do exactly what my friend said: We buy all of our food at the farmer’s market and make it work all week. This fantasy includes a trip to the regular grocery store every other week or so to get things like tea and other items you can’t get at the market, but the farmer’s market would drive our eating*. My own little theory about this is that if we buy food that is interesting and high quality, I am less tempted to do things like eat out or run to the store at the last minute to get something easy to cook.

I mentioned this to Melissa last weekend after I was home from the market, and she said, “Yeah, I wish we did that.” We decided that at the very least, we’d come to the market this weekend and do some of our shopping. A few days later, I suggested to Melissa that we make a pact: For just one week, we’d try getting all of our food from the market. If she’d agree to this, I wouldn’t go out to get food at all this week, including coffee. Melissa jumped on this because, I admit, I spend far, far too much on eating out and coffee during the week, and I am the one most likely to go to the grocery store randomly.

The usual problem with this plan is that it takes time to cook and prep food and keep it from going bad in the fridge (which happens all too often to farmer’s market bounty in our house). However, I have a little extra time right now, and will until classes start mid-August.

We spent $105 at the market on Saturday morning, and there is a list below of what we got. I have no idea if we’ve over or under-shopped, and I think it’ll be interesting to find out**. I have been eating the hell out of this salad for the past week or two, which is why there are beets, and Melissa made carnitas on Sunday, hence the pork butt. I also have plans to make some panzanella and possibly fattoush, as those are things I want to eat all summer, and an eggplant salad that I found in the Penzey’s catalog, which is a surprisingly good source for recipes.

Feta

Breakfast sausage

Bacon

Pork shoulder

Eggs

Lettuce

Sweet potatoes

Beets

Arugula

Basil

Parsley

Cilantro

Jalapenos

Red & green bell peppers

3 German Johnson tomatoes

2 eggplants

Loaf polenta bread

Loaf other kind of bread

Corn

Little potatoes

Onions

*An even better fantasy is having all of our vegetables come from the yard, but oh, we’re so far from this.

**Since I wrote this on Saturday (it's Monday now), I've leaned towards "over-shopped."

My thoughts on North Carolina's anti-gay amendment

For weeks, I’ve been thinking, “I ought to write about the amendment and how it will affect my family.” I will write something sweet and lovely, I thought, an homage to my family and to all of us normal gay people out there just living our lives. There would be baby pictures, because I believe that just to look at my child is to love my family; he is that beautiful to me.  I thought, I will include a lot of facts that are not along the lines of “you are ignorant and on the wrong side of history if you vote for this amendment,” but more like “unmarried straight couples with children will be hurt by this amendment, too.” I thought that would be kinder and gentler and appeal to more people.

 I thought I will write this, and then I will share the link, and maybe one or two people out there who are undecided will see this and will be persuaded to vote against the amendment. Or, at the very least, my post would fire up someone who would vote against the amendment but who might forget to vote because it’s not that important to them. It seemed worth it to do this.

I kept not writing, though. I mean, I am very busy, right, so that’s one reason, but this is important enough to me that you would think I’d find the time. I didn’t, though.

I’m just too fucking angry.

I’m not easy to anger. In the midst of an argument a few weeks ago, my partner told me, “You never snap at me.” I don’t. I am much more inclined to disdain. I don’t get fired up. My version of anger is to sneer a little then pretend I don’t care until I’m over it.

This anti-gay “pro marriage” amendment, though, this has me full of rage. I haven’t done it yet, but I can’t guarantee that I won’t key your car or slash your tires if I see an anti-gay bumper sticker on your car. I have started thinking of people who speak out for the amendment, or have yard signs letting everyone know how bigoted they are, as “trash.” This—a word that has certainly been applied to my family more than once, a word that has caused many an eyeroll when spilled from the lips of random Carrboro/Chapel Hill liberals who secretly yet obviously hate poor people—is not an insult that comes to me easily, but I can’t think of anything else that fits. “Trash” carries the sense of worthlessness and irrelevance I want when describing bigots.

See, the difference between my kind of liberal and that kind of liberal is that I fucking expect you to be decent and act right, no matter how much money you have or don’t have. You don’t get the grace of “ignorant” or “uneducated” or “unworldly” from me. You fucking ought to know better.  I do. My mama does. My brother does.

A couple of paragraphs ago, I mentioned that my partner and I got in a fight. We do that. If I was in a different frame of mind, I might include that in a gentle little list of things that gay people do that are just like straight people.

But fuck all that. Fuck you, if you don’t have enough compassion and enough of a theory of mind to really get that most people aren’t that different from you, and that this truth is the basis of compassion and understanding. Something is wrong with you—yes, you are fucking broken inside and probably jealous and small and will always have a tiny, little, miserable fucking life--if you want to punish me for the way I choose to live my life. You can think I’m stupid and wrong all you want—I will do the same thing to you, particularly if you think your own private religious beliefs ought to dictate a single goddamned thing about public life—but do not try to fucking tear down my walls and tell me that I have no rights as a parent to my child or no rights as a wife to Melissa. Stay out of my goddamned life, and leave me alone, you terrible human being.

That’s why I haven’t written anything. 

Er. So. Feel free to share this with your friends. There’s a palate cleansing baby picture over here. Also, more usefully, if you want more facts and reasoned arguments about this, you should befriend my friend Nathaniel Grubbs on Facebook. He posts a lot of really great stuff, from a religious (Baptist, even) perspective.

A break from the internet

I never finished my travel stories from over a year ago and it feels really awkward to move on from that last entry without doing that, so let me sum up: Melissa got a terrible cold. We met Mel, a friend I'd known on the internet since I was 16, and that was cool. We visited the British Museum, which is my favorite museum of all the museums I've ever visited. Oh, we also visited the Tower of London somewhere in there, which was also extremely cool.

Are we good? Has some of the awkwardness dissipated? We're good if I don't even mention the baby we've had since we went to Europe? Great!

A couple of weeks ago, I posted this to Twitter: "Sometimes when I can't get to Facebook I have a small uplifting moment where I go, 'Maybe someone has destroyed it and we're all free now.'" Since then, I've asked myself over and over, "If I feel that way, why do I keep using these things?"

As you have probably guessed from the title, I am posting about the break from the internet I am about to take. "Why are you posting about that here?" you ask, very wisely, because it's not like I have posted here in a very long time and will be neglecting an audience if I take a break.

I am posting here because, see, I have a fantasy. I have a fantasy about a life where I do not hit the refresh button on my browser a thousand times a day. I have a fantasy where my free time is spent reading books that I love rather than rolling my eyes at the fifty utterly inane things my "friends" have reposted on Facebook in the past hour, things that weren't funny when they were first printed on cheap t-shirts in the 80s, or things about Jesus or Republicans or Democrats that get reposted due to some impulse that does not sit well with me, even when I'm the one who has done it. Where I don't have to put the word friends in scare quotes because my interaction with them is a little bit more meaningful and less dissipated through social media. Where when I read things, I read in big chunks and not little soundbites. Where I have time to think about something I've just read rather than flicking on to the next thing.

I don't think all social media is bad, or even most of it. But I am jealous of my time, and I have this fantasy. I'm posting about it here because, in this fantasy, my blog is the only place I post anything.

I've also been reading a book with a main character who reads constantly. She's 15. It's reminded me that when I was young, I read constantly, too. I took a book with me everywhere. I never stopped reading. I miss that. I still read plenty, but when I have a few minutes I am more apt to check my phone than I am to read a page or two of a book, and that feels somehow less true to myself. If I were about to die, one of my regrets would be "I haven't read enough books."

I don't know if everyone does this, but when I feel like this about something, I tend to make plans. How can I get from this fantasy to reality? I think. This is my way. Yesterday I sat outside (in the sunshine in February!) and wrote this list of rules down, and I thought about writing this post, and how it would be embarrassing to announce this on Facebook even if I was doing it just for accountability, and that thought made me want to do this even more, because one of the things that makes me most uncomfortable about Facebook is letting so many people back into my life that I was probably well rid of a long time ago.

The truth is, it's likely nothing would ever have come of this--who knows, really--because I am an old hat at making these kinds of plans, but I am also realistic and know that it's hard to break habits, and my flicking around the internet habit is very well ingrained. I usually make a plan like this and then carry on my merry way, possibly moderating my behavior a little bit, but nothing drastic. I tend to think that shaking things up too much can be stressful, and I do not need extra stress right now.

But this morning I mentioned my fantasy to Melissa and I said, "I was thinking about doing this until spring break, I probably won't, but..." and she laughed and said, "I'd be impressed if you did this for just one week."

Challenge accepted, I thought, and here I am. It's a good week for it, as I need to spend most of next week prepping for tests that are the week after, and I have a paper due. I am going to follow the rules I wrote down until next Friday morning. It may be unrealistic to think I could stay away from Facebook and Twitter until spring break, but hell, a week? I can do this. Right? I totally can. I've just deleted a bunch of bookmarks to make this a little more easy, and I went through Twitter and Facebook to remove all emailed notifications they might send. I'm about to update Goodreads since I finished that book last night. I'll post a link to this post at both Facebook and Twitter. Then I'm out, at least from a lot of things.

If I like it, I might keep right on until spring break. If it's a nightmare, well, I'll quit. And hell, if it's making me completely crazy in two days, you'll see me around in the usual places, because it's not worth it if I can't get anything done.

Our Christmas Vacation: Day Eleven

Our vacation has been a whirlwind. We knew it would be, and we are okay with that, but that makes it a little bit like a week long summer camp with some European cities--you know, where you don't really get to know people, but you feel like you do, and the strength of those brief friendships sticks with you for a long time after? Paris is the guy at the pool that I have a huge crush on; London is the girl in my cabin that I stay up with late and whisper about the guy at the pool.

Our hotel is half a block away from St. Paul's. We went to the evening service there tonight, and we toured it earlier today. It was a Connie Willis tour, because we are nerds, and we stood in front of the Light of the World and thought about Dunworthy and I swiped the order of service and thought about Polly and I wandered through the crypt and wondered if the fire watch slept down there (no, actually, I'm told they mostly slept on the main floor). St. Paul's is, beyond our nerdiness, an incredibly beautiful cathedral. We couldn't take pictures inside, however.

After visiting St. Paul's, we walked down to Trafalgar Square for the New Year's Day parade. We got rained on and only saw a bit of the parade before we gave up and got lunch, then went on our own little walking tour of London. We saw Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham Palace.


Then we went to Hyde Park, which is partially a Christmas wonderland.

I went there in part for the Christmas festival, definitely, but the real reason for going to Hyde Park was because of, er, well. The--um. How can I say this?

The reason I had to go to Hyde Park is because of the regency romances I've been reading. So I wandered through the winter wonderland and then sat with Melissa on a bench next to the Serpentine.

I tried to convince Melissa that we should have a spat, after which she would go home to her study and think about how infuriating I am. Then in the course of her musings she would realize that she was in love with me and devise an excuse to call on me the next day, and we'd make out in a parlor with a slightly open door. And I would feel feelings I didn't quite understand, but by the end of the book, I totally would.

We just came back to the hotel, though. Melissa is, unfortunately, sick as hell. We've gotten a bit pathetic near the end of our travels--too much standing outside in the cold and rain, I imagine. I am feeling a lot better, but my feet perpetually hurt. Melissa can barely breathe, she's so sick. I am not exactly sure what we're going to do tomorrow--the plan was the British Museum so Melissa can look at more old stuff, but museums wear us out more than anything else, so maybe not. We're just going to see how she feels when she gets up.

Which is not to say that if she wasn't sick I could have convinced her to have a spat and some drama with me, but let me preserve my dream, okay?