Egghead23’s Weblog

Finished Away last night.  The end left me cold, and the more I think about the book, the less I actually like it.  The more I think about it, the more cliche some of the moments become, and also there’s a lot of gratuitous sex in it.  For a book about this plucky, determined character that I was taken with so completely, it took me to a place that I can only describe (without giving away the ending) as nowhere. Overall, a disappointment.

So then, I started Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.  I made it through the first short story last night, and it was excellent.

It’s July already.  We have been whirlwind busy, and for the most part things are good, though the bickering and tattling presents some challenges.

I had some trouble sleeping last night.  Not sure why.  Last night I watched Stardust, which has a great cast, including Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Claire Daines.  I really liked it.  Reminded me a bit of The Princess Bride, but more in a fantasy vein with a pinch of Harry Potter, and also a bit of the same flavor as the ABC show Pushing Daisies.  Overall, I found it entertaining.

Then I read for a bit, and couldn’t put Away down.  I have about 60 pages to go.  I turned out the light around 12:30, Manfrengensen already snoozing beside me, and then I tossed and turned for another hour.  I feel a bit grumpy today, and I need to be on my game.  The boys are both having friends over for playdates this afternoon.

…So many books….So little time….I can’t finish anything if it doesn’t pull me in….

I have been having trouble getting into anything for months.  The last book I read all the way through was Marisa de los Santos’ Belong to Me, which was good, but uneven.  Her writing is at times spot on, and the poet really comes out of her with some beautiful imagery.  There were scenes about a woman who had cancer that made me break down and cry. Other times, though she’s just okay, and downright cliche, like the brother character that I could see played in a movie by Keanu Reeves circa 1990. Still, the book was worth finishing and generally enjoyable.

But since finishing that, I haven’t been able to get into anything.  I started Jennifer Weiner’s new book, Certain Girls.  Again, the writing is good, but overall I found the central plot elements not as engrossing as her previous works.  I put it down about a third of the way through.  I hope to go back to it, but in general, it hasn’t called to me.  I really have liked her previous work too.  This one is a sequel to Good in Bed, which I loved.  One thing I find kind of annoying though is how Weiner is always hitting us over the head with how ugly Cannie is.  We get it, she’s fat, she doesn’t look like everyone else, but still I keep thinking, she’s not. I like to think that no one is ugly, at least not on the outside.  One of the things I loved about Good In Bed was how Cannie came to accept who she was, that she wasn’t this waif or super model and it was okay to be so.  In this one, she’s back to all that superficial wondering, and even though Cannie shuns the cultural manifestations of ideal beauty, it’s still a factor.  Now, maybe if I finish it, I will find that inner beauty triumphs once again, but in the meantime, as a reader, I am floundering.

So, then I tried to read something more substantial.  I started Churchill and Gandhi: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, because of a great review I’d read in the New York Times a few weeks back.  Heady, heady stuff.  Not an easy book to carry around to the beach or in your bag, since its weight is as heavy as its subject matter.  Ultimately though, I couldn’t get through the introduction, as its depiction of savage killings in rural India were too disturbing for me.

So then, I decided I didn’t want to read anything in hardback.  It’s too hard to cart to the beach and all. I tried some classic literature, a novel by Willa Cather called My Antonia.  I know it’s a classic and all, but reading about farming at this time of year, and a kind of slow read at that….BORING.

So, I broke down and got the latest from David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames.  Hardback, yes, however Sedaris has never failed to entertain me in the past.  But again, hate to say it, didn’t pull me in.  A few chuckles here and there, and yes very well-written stuff, but ultimately I feel like this is not his best game, and also some of the essays feel strangely familiar.  I kind of got the sense that I had heard some of this before, maybe on NPR or something.  I got about a third of the way through and put it down.  I’ll go back, surely, but it just wasn’t calling to me to read it.  Might be a good book to keep in the bathroom, as a lot if it seems to be short-attention-span reading.

I really feel like sometimes it is so hard just to find a good book.  If you look at the best seller lists, especially the trade paperbacks, which I like to read, most of those titles have been there like forever. Some books seem to be lucky enough to get on “the book club circuit,” and they just ride and ride for an eternity.  Nice for the authors, I am sure, but it can be very frustrating trying to find something that is new and worth reading.  Take, for example, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which my book club read last summer.  Still on the best seller list, simply because book clubs across the country are reading and discussing.  Personally, I thought it was just an “okay” book.  Nothing that haunted or stuck with me other than the scarring memory of some kind of tannish, near-microscopic critter crawling across a page of the copy I borrowed from the library. EEK!! Yet there it is every week, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, taking up space on the trade fiction list, (this week it’s number 9, with 41 weeks on the list) where I want to see something new, and fresh, and really worth reading.

This month, my friends in the book club picked a book I had no interest in reading.  I don’t know…maybe because it’s summer, I just feel like light stuff, and again, not in the mood for a hardback.  The choices put forth by the person presenting the choices this month were Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, Amy Bloom’s  Away and Emily Giffin’s Love the One You’re With.  They voted for Away, and I was kind of disappointed because in the last year, I’ve read SO MUCH Jewish-heritage fiction, much of which is very good, and the subject is certainly compelling, but I just feel like, enough for me.  A few months ago I swore off anything having to do with Jewish heritage, pogroms or World War II.  Just for a while.

So it was with a reluctance that I finally cracked the cover of Away two days ago.  (I waited for its June 24th paperback release.) And let me tell you:  It is the book I have been looking for.  Beautifully written with compelling characters, I can’t wait to get back to it at the end of the day.  In fact yesterday, while Ee was napping and the boys were playing Wii, I snuck away with the book and relaxed for a bit, rather than tending to my myriad chores.

The book tells the story of a Jewish immigrant named Lillian Leyb. Befallen by tragedy, she escapes the pogroms of Russia to make her way to 1920’s America.  She’s strong and endearing, and (according to the book jacket) she makes her way across the U.S. and back to Russia searching for the daughter she lost and assumed had died the night her family was murdered.  The language is ethereal and yet easily accessible.  So far, I am enjoying it immensely.

It is haunting, and I cannot wait to get back to it now.  It’s nice to know that feeling again.

So, this morning, I woke up with Ee calling from her crib, “Mommy, come get me.  Stinky pants.” Pause.  ”Stinky pants, Mommy.  Come get me.” Pause.  ”Mommy, my hand’s dirty.”

So, at that point, I jumped out of bed.  Good grief, I was thinking.  Great way to freaking start the day.

But here’s the thing: she was lying.  Not even three and she’s figured out that this is the perfect way to get my ass out of bed pronto.

How do my children continually outsmart me?

Last night Manfrengensen and I watched La Vie En Rose, which was excellent.  I don’t know off hand if the make-up won an Oscar, but it should have.  My only complaint was that it didn’t have subtitles for the songs, and I think they would have meant more to me if I had known the words she was singing.  I got that they were conveying a kind of emotion, but still, would have been nice to understand the words.  Like in a movie like Walk the Line, when he sang about walking it, you knew which line it was.

Can’t wait for this movie!!!!

This woman is suing Victoria’s Secret because a charm flew off her thong underwear while she was putting them on, hitting her in the eye.  I wonder about some people some time.  Also, check out her age.  That kind of surprised me.

We’ve got one of those holes in our door that the mail comes through and lands with a FWAP!! on the hardwood floor that startled me every single time for the first two years we lived here.  As I walked toward the pile today, there was a large first class envelope face down under the pile, its triangle-printed edges waving to me like flags, little green reminders of the myriad manuscripts I’ve got out there in the stratosphere awaiting consideration.  My heart sank, heavy in my chest as I approached the pile, and I knew it wasn’t just that cheeseburger I’d had at lunch.  I know that envelope all too well. Returned manuscript means “no thanks,” usually with all the warmth and encouragement that a standard form rejection letter can muster, and I have seen enough of those in the past few months.

Worried for nothing though. Turned out to be an update from Manfrengensen’s professional association.  Hooray!  That’s one more day the manuscript’s afloat out there on the wind.

Grey’s Anatomy’s Katherine Heigl for having the guts to call it like she saw it. Ms. Heigl withdrew her name from consideration for this year’s Emmy Awards, because she felt the material that was written for her character, Izzy Stevens was not good enough.

Read the story here: Heigl Shuns Emmys

Good for her!  She’s so right.  The plot line for her character was awful this season.  The writers and producers took her down a path that was so wrong that it was almost insulting to viewers. I guess it started last season, but after a fight with his wife, George O’Malley got drunk with Izzy and they slept together.  Then this season, based on their vague memories of an “amazing” sexual experience, he decided to leave his wife to pursue a relationship with Izzy, which totally didn’t work out.  The two of them spent weeks trying to make an awkward love affair work, and it was awful to watch.  It made me cringe, and in fact, I stopped watching until the season finale.

Heigl herself said in a recent interview that she felt the affair was nothing more than a “ratings ploy.”  I also felt like when the producers realized the viewers thought the relationship was wrong, then they abandoned the story.  How are we, as viewers, supposed to invest in these stories and relationships that go nowhere? (More below)

And other than that, what did Izzy have to do this season?  After rolling around unsuccessfully with George, biting her lip and trying to avoid his wife for a few episodes, she was basically relegated to a background character, standing around with a clip board and working between the real action of Meredith/Derek and George/Lexi.

Izzy’s an interesting character.  She worked her way through med school by modeling, she’s got an illigitimate daughter that she’s never seen, but the writers don’t work with that.  Instead, they use the sex and throw her in bed with George.

Some have speculated that Heigl may actually be working to find a way out of her contract with the show, another smart move, if you ask me.  Shondaland seems like it must be the cattiest place in the world to work. The show itself is super-chicky, to the point that the men are plastic and one-dimensional, mere eye candy, and this fall’s Private Practice looks like it’s going to be even worse in that department.  Anyway, the writing In Shondaland is so…whatever the opposite of misogynistic is..that I could swear in Season Two of Grey’s that the writers were just trying to find ways to make male genitalia suffer.  Sometimes it seemed like they made up conditions just to be able to use the word “penis” on the air.  It was all very Elaina Bobbitt.

But back to the chicky nature of Shondaland.  I still don’t understand why Isaiah Washington had to leave the show.  Yes, he said a stupid and regrettable thing.  Yes, he brought it up again at the Emmys, again, stupid and regrettable, but he apologized. He tried to make amends.  He went to counseling, did his service, jumped through all the hoops the media or whoever demanded he jump through, and then, he was fired in the end.

Think about it — again, yes, what he said was stupid and regrettable, but if we fired everyone who said something stupid or regrettable in their work place, wouldn’t the economy collapse?

And really, I don’t care about any of that as a viewer of the show.  As far as I can see, those in Shondaland should have been jumping for joy over the attention all the controversy brought to the show, but instead, they held a grudge, and wrote him out.

And that sucked.  Because as a viewer, I spent three freaking seasons rooting for Burke to win Christina, to get her to open up to him and give him the love he deserved for being so patient with her crazy shit.  So then what happened?  I the shocking season 3 finale, he left her at the altar.  Didn’t make any sense at all, given the story arc of the show, and as a viewer with the kind of emotional investment I just described, I felt like we’d all gotten the shaft.  The whole thing was completely unprofessional.  No respect for the viewers at all.

So any way, my hat’s off to Katherine Heigl.  I know ultimately, these things don’t matter, but I still respect her for respecting herself and her craft.

I am officially finished with this show.

The other day I served these wheat crackers at a party we had for J’s birthday.  Today I was moving things around in the pantry, and I noticed there was a note on the front of the box of crackers claiming they are “IMPORTED.”  So, I thought, is that really necessary?  To import wheat crackers into the U.S.?  We grow wheat, in fact, farming wheat is a huge part of “our thing.” Amber waves of grain and such. What could be so great about imported wheat?  I decided to investigate further.  Turns out the crackers were made in Canada. Canada?  Really? That’s not imported.  From Canada should not count as imported.  Also turned out that the crackers are actually made by Kraft Foods.  Again, shouldn’t count as imported.  It’s like claiming Welch’s Grape juice is imported.  Stupid.

In any case, T3 says they tasted “like dog.”

Speaking of T3, he took another couple of weeks off my life today.  We went to the library, and they have a little playground there, so we hung out for a while after getting our books and stuff.  There were these two other boys there, and the four of them got right along, running and climbing and doing boy stuff.  Super nice kids, very friendly and sweet, even to Ee, who kept trying to keep up with the four of them. I sat in the shade on a bench, and every so often they would congregate around me, quizzing me on different aspects of life.  The other boys were quite nimble, more nimble than my own, who tried, but could only watch them in amazement. The other boys were climbing to the top of the equipment, doing flips and things like something out of Cirque de Soleil.  These are girls, but you kind of get the idea.

So, they were all around me, and we were having a nice little chat, though T3 was still bouncing around on the bench and stuff.  All of a sudden, I saw him lose his grip, and BAM!  Darned if he didn’t smack his mouth right on the back of the metal bench, slamming all of his weight on his lower jaw.  He immediately started to cry, which is not his usual MO.  He came over to me and opened his mouth, and I couldn’t see his teeth for the blood.  I ran to my car and grabbed a handful of tissues, stanching the blood as best I could,  then collected everyone in order to rush home quickly to the ice pack.  It stopped bleeding soon after we got home, and luckily it seems like only one tooth is maybe a little loose, but overall, major disaster averted.

Still, this is how I feel a lot of the time:

Good night’s sleep despite the wicked thunderstorms that raged last night.  Took our maiden showers in the newly updated facility.  We are still lacking the shower door (one to two weeks probably) but everything else was working — and heavenly so.

T3 slept without his pacifiers for the first time last night.  We have been trying to convince him to give them up for a long long time, but he only responded by tightening his grip and hoarding them.  When he finally turned them over to me yesterday, there were a total of eight, all of which he had been taking to bed with him each night.  Manfrengensen says this development is an example of why a free market economy works best.  If you give people an incentive, say a trip to ToysRUs, then they will do the right thing, like give up their binkies.

Last night, we also began the new program of “one meal” for the family each night, instead of the short-order cooking I have been doing.  Chicken soft tacos went over okay, even though they ate only the chicken and refused the tortillas.  Crazy, right?  They did eat it, even though it took them forever, and no one threw up, (though J did almost make himself gag a couple of times) but that’s a vast improvement over previous efforts to widen their horizons when it comes to eating.  Surprisingly, it was Ee who refused to eat, and she’s usually the one I don’t have to worry about.  She ate an apple for dinner instead.

I find I have been wasting a lot of time lately.  I should be working on my book, but the other night I went to work on it, and it is such a mess, not where I want it to be, that I just had to walk away.  It’s brewing though…

I went to book club the other night.  Sometimes I feel like…I have no connection to people.  I mean I like them, but when they all start talking about how they are looking forward to seeing Journey in concert, and re-constituted Journey at that…I have a hard time identifying. They were lamenting the fact that it wasn’t Steve Perry singing any more and I thought, Good, finally a reason to respect Steve Perry. Tell me about a re-constituted Clash concert, or the Replacements, and then maybe, maybe I will be interested.  I think I am just past the age for all that…nothing really tempts me, not even The Police, to shell out the Franklins.  Maybe the Pixies would…definitely, I’d go for the Pixies.  Yes, I know they did get back together briefly, but they didn’t come play close enough to me.

And what would be “close enough to me” exactly?  Ideally my living room, but even so, they didn’t come to my town or the closest major city.  Not that I would hear about it if they did because I avoid pop radio in general.

And it’s not that I think I am better than the Journey fans…I just feel like I am out of step with those I am surrounded by.  It’s like high school all over again, complete with the same soundtrack, only without the anxiety.

And when it comes to festival shows, I totally agree with Andrew Kuo, who put it perfectly in this graphic in the Sunday Times:

I couldn’t agree more, though because I am digitally challenged, I can’t make the graphic any bigger for you.  You can link to it here: Kuo Festival Chart.  I highly recommend you check it out, as I laughed out loud several times over breakfast this past Sunday while perusing it.

Gotta go to the park now, it’s a beautiful day…

Great moment in a great day of being a mom today.  I took hold of one of the supersoakers, as the kids were complaining that they couldn’t get it to work.  They just weren’t pumping enough air into it, so I fixed it and squirted all five of them, (they had friends over from across the street) while shouting, “SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!”  They all ran, squealing in that delightful way little kids do.

Today we were sitting at lunch and J said he thought barn owls were an endangered species.  I said I wasn’t so sure.  He claimed never to have seen one, so I asked, “Well, how many barns have you been in?”

“One,” he said, and went on to reason that since he hadn’t seen one there, they must be rare.

“I’ve been in a barn,” T3 chimed in.

“Oh, Yeah?” we asked.

“No,” he giggled, “it was actually a Barnes and Noble.  I’ve been in a Barnes and Noble.”