Dreaming

Last night I had this sweet dream about going out for ice tea. I was sitting on a patio, surrounded by people from past that I've had conflicts with and everyone was fat and reconciliatory, and we laughed and rebuilt bridges and I showed them my house down the street. It was big and old and in the middle of a renovation and the porch could fit 40 people on it. I hung white Christmas lights on it and threw a party and danced hugged people and had a wonderful night. I went to find hubby to tell him about it, but he was nowhere. I went through 30 rooms before I found him asleep on a couch by a window. When I woke him up, he wrapped his arms around me, and we sat on the couch and looked out at a blue spruce and we talked for hours and fell asleep again. We woke up with the sun in our faces and we took our crazy dog for a walk and we told each other jokes and drank some more ice tea. I woke up feeling fantastic... to an empty bed, because hubby's in the hospital getting a round of chemo. I walked my crazy dog in the snow and cold and trudged back in to my house to make a cup of tea and warm up.

And now I can't decide if I feel good or bad.

What I'm reading

I finished Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman, shortly after this book, and it was a welcome change. Gaiman's short stories range from the terrifying to the simply strange, and when he doesn't tell me the big secret, I'm fairly confident that I don't want all the answers. I realize that there's been some brouhaha over his profile in the New Yorker, but I don't agree with the outrage, and every time I read one of his books, I'm just grateful for good imaginative narratives in this world.

Next book (I've already started it, and I'm loving it): Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip.

Status report

So hubby had a bad setback that landed him back in the hospital. (I referenced it here) He caught an infection in his blood from his catheter, and his blood counts were so low that he started bleeding in his eyes and experienced some vision loss. We've been to three specialists, and no one is sure how permanent this vision loss is going to me. So many maybes... Hubby went into a full-blown panic for a while, which terrified me. He doesn't panic, and I don't know how to deal with his panic. He's so solid and strong, even when he's not, and I just didn't know what to do.

We've taken some real financial hits throughout this, and our taxes provided the nasty surprise that hubby forgot to change his tax withholdings and the feds are going to be the latest vampires at the door. I'm trying not to go around the bend, and I'm not really winning at that, and I've been full of frustration and despair and other things that I can't name. Then I talked to an old friend from high school. She's been reading my posts on facebook and she decided that she wanted to do something to show her support of my family, even though we haven't seen each other in 12 years or so. So she's going to run a half-marathon to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I'm completely flabbergasted. I'm so touched that she's putting forth this kind of effort (she's never even met hubby) for someone she knew in high school. I think this is a testament to the idea that our words, our pain... it has power... Even when it's half-expressed and ill-conceived ideas. I'm glad I can still reach people... and that there are people in the world that care enough to run 13 miles because I hurt.

Please help Send Amanda to the Bayshore Marathon.

Donate if you can.

What I'm reading (maybe it's me)

So I've finished The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent. The book follows a 10-year-old girl and her family in an early American settlement. Her family is implicated in charges of witchcraft (and spreading the plague) and several members are tried in Salem. The author is a descendant of one of her characters, so clearly she has some attachment to her work.

That being said, she covers three years in about 300 pages, (100 pages per year, roughly) and most of it is about fried beaver tails and skirt hems and sewing lessons. When she wasn't covering the exacting minutiae of life in 1690, she's was alluding to some deep secret of the father of the family relating to his life back in England. The icing of the piece is the bloated, bloated, bloated writing.

Now, maybe it's me, but I shouldn't have to sit through 300 pages of skirt hems and harvest time just to get to a trial that's barely mentioned and then another 7 pages where the narrator discovers the detail of her father's secret and then declines to share it with us. It doesn't seem fair to bore the living shit out of me and then refuse to deliver. I know that there are people who dig this stuff, they prefer to read fictionalized history because they suspect that real histories are too dry. If this is the best example of that genre, I'll make sure to avoid it in the future.

I feel cheated by this. There was no story in this story, and the one secret that I was actually interested in is still left unexplained. This is Kent's first book, and I'm trying to look at it more kindly in that light (forgiving endless unnecessary metaphors and the like), but I don't think I'll ever pick up another book by this author. Now, if you click the link at the top of the post, you'll see that the amazon reviewers seem to vehemently disagree with me. So, maybe it's me.

It's not, this book sucked.

So sweet.

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The 2009-2010 book list

Okay, sorry this took so long. I'm really feeling the limitations of my blogger skills right now. The titles in italics are books I already own (I've already read the first 3, and I'm in the middle of number 4). Through the year, these are the books that I'll be covering in my semi-regular "What I'm reading" posts. (Possibly some extras too.) Give a holler if you have any other suggestions. I'll update on the hubby later in the day, or later in the week.

1. Ta-Nehisi Coates The Beautiful Struggle
2. Moveable Feast, Hemingway
3. Push by Sapphire
4. Kathleen Kent The Heretic’s Daughter
5. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
6. The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
7. Word War Z: An Oral history of the zombie wars by Max Brooks
8. Looking for Calvin and Hobbes by Nevin Martell
9. Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
10. Dream City by Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood
11. The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick
12. Eyal Press Absolute Convictions
13. Robert Leleux Beautiful Boy
14. Uglies by Scott Westefeld
15. Blindness by Jose Saramago
16. Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
17. The Billionaire’s Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace
18. Toy Monster: The Big Bad World of mattel
19. Look at Me by Jennifer Egan
20. Quiverfull by Kathryn Joyce
21. Erasure by Percival Everett
22. Super in the City by Daphne Uviller
23. Voluntary Madness by Norah Vincent
24. Gimme Shelter by Mary Elizabeth Williams
25. Dating Jesus by Susan Campbell
26. Escape by Caroyln Jessup
27. A Grand Army of Black Men by Edwin S. Redkey
28. American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund Morgan
29. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
30. American Odyssey by Robert Conot
31. A Nation Under Our Feet by Stephen Hahn
32. The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti
33. The rage of a Privileged Class by Ellis Cose
34. the social theory of practices by Stephen turner
35. When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race by Judith Stone
36. Bad Boys by Ann Ferguson
37. Garfield minus Garfield
38. Washington, D.C. Protests: Scenes from Home Rule to the Civil Rights Movement By Mark S. Greek
39. American Colonies by Alan Taylor
40. The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood
41. Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson
42. Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon
43. Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching by Paula J. Giddings
44. The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money by Brad DeLong and Stephen Cohen
45. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
46. Weevils In The Wheat: Interviews With Virginia Ex-slaves
47. Lauren Sandler's Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement
48. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
49. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
50. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
51. Confederate Emancipation by Bruce Levine

Why this pisses me off....

I got two facebook emails today on the same subject. Here they are:

This was in my inbox and thought I'd pass it on...not sure in teh least how it is supposed to spread cancer awareness but I have gotten the idea it is annoying some of hte guys and who can resist that? *evil laugh*

"Some fun is going on... Just write the colour of ur bra in your status nothing else and send it on to only girls no men. It will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes b4 the men will wonder why all the girls have colour in their statuses!"

and...

Something fun is going around! Update your status with the color of your bra, nothing else in the message, just the color. Then send this to all the gals on your friend list, but none of the guys. Let's see how far this goes to spread cancer awareness and how long it takes before the guys start wondering about the color updates!

I wrote this status update as a response:

Dear friends: if knowing the color of my underwear helped heal cancer, my husband wouldn't be lying in a hospital bed in the fucking emergency room right now. Feel free to spread all the bullshit forwards you want, but leave me the fuck out of it.

So here's a brief list of my issues with this message, mostly for the benefit of people who sent it to me, and then saw my status update:

1. Secret memes don't raise awareness of anything. It's a game, which is nice for people who remain untouched by this illness, but why send it to me? I don't PLAY cancer games. I live with cancer. I know that you know the difference.

2. If the only way to raise awareness about a serious health issue is to titillate friends and acquaintances with talk of your underwear, then there's something wrong with your friends and acquaintances, or there's something wrong with you. Using your tits to sell concern about cancer is crass, base, and is the sort of behavior that makes you complicit in your own objectification. Even if you don't consider yourself a feminist, you know that I DO. So again, why send this to me?

It didn't help that I was getting these emails while I'm trying to communicate with John's oncologist while in the ER. (He was admitted tonight, apparently he's got a nasty unidentifiable infection and he needs [another] series of blood transfusions.) I have ignored the other stupid facebook cancer meme, with the stupid heart shapes in the fucking status updates, but this one...is just fucking appalling.

What I'm reading

I’ve read two books and two Sandman volumes since Christmas. I’d like to comment on Sandman as a larger work when I’ve finished the whole series. Neil Gaiman is such an elegant and nuanced writer (and a pretty good blogger), that I don’t want to comment on what’s going on in his work until I get to see the whole picture. I love comic book ‘volumes.’ I don’t have the time to track individual comics (I have a hard enough time remembering which volume I’m due to read next if I wait too long), and the volumes are as meaty as a novella, and a great way to spend an afternoon for me. Sandman is a particular favorite, because my husband and I read them at about the same pace, (he’s a slower reader of other things) and we can share them and discuss them…usually at least. So, Sandman is great (and please, please, Neil Gaiman, write some more novels) but it’s not what I’m going to talk about today.

On to the books. I read The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates, my favorite blogger. There’s not much I can say about this book without dissolving into fangirl gushing, so I’ll just say that I consider it required reading for everyone.

The other book I read (and the whole point of this post, finally, in the third paragraph, because I've become really undisciplined in my writing) was The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. This book was an anomaly for me for a few reasons. First, I compile a list throughout the year of books I want to read or sound interesting, and I try to pursue books on that list first (comic books not included, I go through too fast), this book was not on that list. Second, I’d convinced myself that Barbara Kingsolver was a romance novelist, and I don’t read romance novels (though, in the spirit of this blogger, I may reconsider). So, I heard Kingsolver speak about her new book on NPR, and I decided to check her out. My office has a small table devoted to book sharing, so I picked up The Poisonwood Bible.

The book details the life of a family (mother, father, and 4 daughters) that decides to travel to the Congo for a missionary post in 1959. The book covers the transition of Congo into Zaire, as well as the (mostly hamfisted) attempts of the missionary father to convert members of their small village to Christianity. Each chapter of the book is narrated by a different female member of the family (we never hear the father from his own perspective) and spans several decades.

At the core, this is a book about the failure of will and the futility of arrogance. The Price family moves to the Congo with hopefulness and surety. They’re confident that they have everything on their side: the right god, the right morals, the proper lessons. Rev. Price even travels with seedlings, since he intends to teach the villagers the proper way to harvest the proper food. The longer they stay, the more apparent it is that they have nothing to offer the villagers or themselves. For all they’re surety, they are completely unprepared. Each family member responds to this in a different way and as a result of different incidents. Eventually the Congo consumes them (in one case, literally) and they are forever changed.

The book had a profound effect on me. Aside from the careful examination of white privilege and its pitfalls (and it WAS careful, more careful than I was expecting), the theme of how life changes you more than you can change lives was powerful for me. I feel that I’ve been teetering on the edge of some sort of emotional growth spurt for months now. I seem to be becoming someone…more. I’ve not given my consent to these changes, and I don’t quite know what they are, but the fact remains that I’m being consumed by the raft of shit that has hit my family in recent months, and that some of these changes will be permanent. One of them seems to be a newfound lack of faith in the power of my will to change my world. That change rattles at the foundations of who I am and how I see myself, and I don’t really know what to do with it. It’s an arrogance that has kept me warm and safe for as long as I’ve felt warm and safe. But the fact remains that those seeds won’t grow in the soil that I’m in, and I somehow have to redefine what’s proper for me in this new context.

When I get a chance, I'll publish the book list, and I'll track how many I get through.

It's late... and I can't sleep...

My grandfather took a fall right before Christmas. He landed on his glasses case, and that managed to break two ribs and puncture a lung. They kept him for a few days, put a tube in his chest, and tried to regulate his blood pressure and blood sugar (I inherited those problems from him). They failed to regulate those things and released him anyway. He went back for a follow-up today. His lung has deflated 20% and his wounds aren't healing. They readmitted him for observation.

After years of struggle, I'm finally in a financial and professional position to be back home when they need me, and I can't leave. God help me, this life is so long...