****************The Inmates Run the Asylum

Matt and the kids playing Cranium Cadoo (the juvenile version of cranium: you still have to do charades, or draw something to make people guess the clue, or sculpt things out of clay, but they're 'easier'):

"Okay, Daddy's drawing."
"What is that?"
"A tree?"
"A tree?"
"DADDY, is it a tree? No?"
"um, a baby tree?"
"a bird... in a tree?"
"a boy...climbing a tree?"

"time's up. What WAS that?"
"Jack and the BEANSTALK?"
"WHAT??? That's a BEANSTALK? And what's that?"
"The cow."
"..... BUT he gave the cow AWAY! And besides, it looks like a pig."

Children are merciless.
****************************

Dinner table conversation:

Matt: "are you nervous for your piano recital?"
Eve: "I'm just nervous that I'm going to do a mistake."
Me: "I did lots of recitals and I made lots of mistakes. Everyone does, it doesn't matter, you just keep playing."
Angus: "Who cares, they're all gonna clap for us anyway. Most of them are Grandmas, they don't care if we screw up."
Eve: "Maybe they'll throw flowers."
Matt: "if you're really good they throw underwear."
Me: (choking and looking disbelievingly at deliverer of unbelievably inappropriate comment)
Eve: (helpless with laughter) "UNDERWEAR??? Has that actually happened to you?"
Me: "NO. He's being a dork. Do not tell ANYONE... actually, go ahead and tell, make sure you tell them DADDY said it."
Angus: "My DAD SPECIFICALLY said..."
Eve: "Why would they pacifically throw underwear at you?"
Angus: "NOT PACIFICALLY. Well, unless you were on a boat."
Eve: "So if you really stink... no, if you're really good, they throw..."
Angus:"How would they get your underwear?"
Me: "I'm going to bed."
Angus: "It's only six-thirty."
Me: "Good night"
Eve: "Can I come?"

*************************************

We got Angus his own email address last night. He's incredibly excited. He's emailed our whole family telling them, and asking them to email him back. He also has one email address from a girl in his class. I explained to him that he doesn't need to tell them his email address, because it comes with the message and they can just hit reply. He said, "I don't think Amanda's that smart".

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Right after supper, he asked if he could go downstairs and email Amanda. Matt immediately said, "hey, the deal is we get to see all the email messages", and I immediately said "why downstairs? Is it a looooove letter?". Angus looked faintly exasperated and said, "No, I just didn't want to demand that you get your laptop out for me to use right after dinner!"

Matt and I apologized for being asshats.

Book Review: February, by Lisa Moore

February. February can't possibly suck as much as November. I've been trying to drag my ass out to the gym all morning. My ass is not cooperating.

February is about Helen O'Mara, whose husband Cal died when the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank. This really happened, which I didn't know until I read the acknowledgements. Helen's husband died when she was thirty, with three kids and one on the way. The book jumps around in time, but essentially tells the story of Helen moving on with her life while still mourning her husband fully and completely for twenty-six years. Jumping around in time can be a dangerous thing to try, but it really works here, particularly because it demonstrates that, raising her children, dealing with her daughter's teenage pregnancy, travelling with her sister, she is always thinking of Cal, remembering what time they had, thinking of the time of which they were robbed, feeling guilty for not being strong enough or sad enough to follow him.

Lisa Moore is a fantastic writer. Except, man, she uses the word spank a lot in this book. The first time I read it I thought "wow, what an innovative, wonderfully descriptive use of the word spank". The fourth time I thought, hmm, the editor didn't want to say, 'Lisa, hon, any chance you're beating your kids a little too much lately? Or, well, you know, what happens in your bedroom totally stays in your bedroom, but..." No, obviously this is inappropriate November humour, but look:

18-“John was this kind of kid: You’d have to say Stop bouncing that ball. The loud spank of it had an echo and the light over the dining room table would vibrate from the noise.”

57-“You don’t want to remember him that way, Dave said. She heard a loud spank of water, a great gushing slap, and looked out into the hall. She had let the bath run over and the water had come through the ceiling.”

212-“Helen’s shirt was soaked under the arms and it stuck to her back. The other cars were very bright in the sunshine. The sun spanked on their red hoods and blue hoods and on the chrome.”

221-“Massage is her area of expertise. Lulu believes every tender hurt and sorrow collects in the flesh and can be worked out with warm baby oil and a good spanking.”

Okay admittedly, that last one was a conventional use of the term. And the others are all innovative and effective. Maybe it would have helped if I hadn't had to read the book in a day and a half so I could give it to my mother because there are a million requests at the library so we won't be able to renew it. Still, shouldn't a good editor catch that kind of thing? Or am I completely overthinking this because it's November and my ass so devoutly wants to stay stuck to this chair and not get dragged to the gym?

It's a great book, my strange preoccupation with the word spank notwithstanding. It's not easy to make someone's grief seem keen and sharp and distinct from the general grief of the world, but Moore does it. November is bad. February is good.

Day 23

I was really enjoying NaBloPoMo until today. I was expecting it to be a full thirty days of sitting here racking my brains trying to come up with something not too trite or dull or wacky, but instead it's been a really good way to force my mind to be a little more active, and the writing has come easier.

Until today. Today I got nothing. I was going to go to the gym but last night after hockey and Swiss Chalet, which was all very enjoyable, I felt like crap. My glands were swollen and I was nodding off my nine-thirty, when I am never, never, never asleep until after eleven. So I decided to hang out at home today, do some cleaning and go to the gym tomorrow. Except I'm afraid I won't. When I don't go on Monday, I have this superstitious fear that fate or my own laziness (are they so different, after all?) will intervene and torpedo the whole week. And I feel old and creaky. I've been walking more, and my knees and hips hurt and my right knee makes an unpleasant grinding noise when I walk up the stairs, and my right outstep (what do you call the part of your foot that's not an instep?) aches.

Anyway, let's talk about the dream I had last night. We discussed the back-in-high-school rushing-around-trying-to-find-an-exam-we-haven't-studied-for dream. Last night I had the back-in-residence dream, except in this dream I'm myself, at this age, trying to start university and live in residence again, and then I realize I'm old and I have a husband and kids and there probably won't be enough room for them in my dresser. I don't always have the same roommate I had in actual residence, but this time I did, and she's one of my best friends who I never get to see any more (she lives in Halifax), so it was nice to see her, even in my confusing, slightly creepy dreamworld. There were a couple of details that I remember from this dream that struck me as kind of interesting. One was that, in order to get your student card, you had to walk around to a bunch of different tables looking at candid group shots taken around campus and find the one with you in it, and line up at that table. I mean, they would just wander around campus taking shots of people walking or sitting and then you would have to find yourself in one. I wonder if this was my subconscious's editorial comment on how arbitrary and confusing some of the university procedures were. The other thing was the anachronistic appearance of Facebook in my dream. You know how you can't dial a phone number correctly in a dream? Turns out you can't type an intelligible Facebook comment on someone's status either. And I'm a stickler about my spelling, so this was really frustrating.

I always wake up from these dreams feeling a little sad and embarrassed. University was a great time and I made some fantastic friends, and I loved having my own room but always being able to walk out of it and find someone to hang out with if I needed to. But it was a long time ago, and I guess I wake up wondering why my subconscious feels the need to revisit it. Maybe it's the newness of being away from home and the sense of endless possibility. I don't really want to go back there. I have a much better handle on who I am now, and I forgive myself a little more easily (a little. Very little. A marginal tiny microscopic quark-sized bit). And my knees and hips were younger and less creaky back then, but my feet always hurt (seriously, I was born with massively f***ed-up feet).

It was just a dream. I'll just take what I can from it and move on. I'm going to email my old roommate and go play the piano badly, and celebrate the possibility that I can relearn that grade 9 Royal Conversatory book before I die.

How Much Information is Too Much?

I did just post a couple of days ago that I'm not against lying to children. And I do believe that some books do not belong in an elementary school library. So I guess I can't write this post with quite the snotty, outraged tone I kind of had in mind before I started. That said, some things do make me think some people have way too much time on their hands.

We had a copy of Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl in the library. One of the poems has the word 'slut' in it. It's British, so slut doesn't mean sexually promiscuous woman, it means untidy person. A mother objected. Then she said maybe we didn't have to take the book out of the library, we could just white out the word. But, um, it's a rhyming book. And the kids aren't stupid.

Even our library technician questions a lot of the subject matter in books for young adults these days. Books about dealing with a parent's depression, books about bullying and drugs and such. I don't know. I tend to think kids in real life have more to deal with these days, and maybe having a few books about those things is not bad. We also have truckloads of Mary Kate and Ashley, Star Wars and Geronimo Stilton and his bad cheese puns.

Yesterday I read Looking for Alaska by John Green. I liked it as much as the other two I've read by him. I think he delineates the struggles and perils of adolescence really well -- plus he's a laugh-out-loud funny writer, who slips the odd devastating insight in.

The main character moves from his home state of Florida to Alabama to attend the same boarding school his father went to. He is intelligent and quirky and has no real friends at home, and he's in search of a new start, a "Great Perhaps", a la Rabelais. He finds it in spades at his new school -- a roommate who becomes a great friend, and a cute, messed-up, irresistibly self-destructive girl named Alaska. It was kind of refreshing that, even though he's captivated by her personality and looks, he does get tired of her being moody and bitchy.

There is mention of sex in the book. The main character receives his first blow job (and it's a hilarious, realistic description), his roommate alludes to having sex with his girlfriend, and condoms are found under someone's mattress. That's pretty much it. A few of the reviewers on Goodreads think this is way too much sex for a YA novel. That's their right, of course. "Too much information", one reader says. I think it's a little naive to think that a book written for teen-agers should pretend that adolescent sex doesn't exist. Show me a teen-ager who, even if they're not having sex, doesn't spend a good portion of their time thinking about it. And whoa -- one blow job, and a reference to someone having safe, responsible sex with her boyfriend. Call me crazy, but could it not be a whole lot worse?

Anyway, that's not even the real reason I had to write this post. The real reason was the comment left on that offended reader's review. The comment that I really really hope was supposed to be a joke: "I read Looking For Alaska and learned things about sex that I hadn't learned in 30 years of marriage".

????????????????????????????????????????????

Oh, I totally know this!

So I went down to Lansdowne Park for World Trivia Night to play with Lynn from Turtlehead (http://diaryofaturtlehead.wordpress.com/ -- I wanted to link to it. I tried to link to it. I thought I knew how to link to it. The HTML error message says 'labels cannot enclose labels'. Come on HTML, I said. 'Can't?'. That's such a negative word. Where would we be if the Wright Brothers believed everyone who told them humans CAN'T fly? I say labels CAN enclose labels! Who's with me?! Turns out HTML is an inflexible bitch.) even though we'd never met and the only picture I've seen of her is blurry and half cut-off and I didn't know any of the other eight people on the team or any of the other thousand people that were going to be there and I'm so shy and socially awkward that just going to the post office makes me break out in hives some days. But hell, it was something fun to do on a Friday night, I'm trying to grow and experience new challenges, and I was told there would be Pringles.

I think I acquitted myself admirably. In the candy-eating department, anyway. Apparently World Trivia can only be answered while ingesting copious amounts of sugar and enough salt to burn an actual hole through your tongue. The best quote of the evening, in my opinion, didn't even involve trivia: it was when the guy across the table from me moaned "I wish I was bulimic".

My great shame of the evening was the one question I could have answered but didn't. It was about an Alberta Farm Girl who became Canada's first female chief justice. I didn't know it, but the name 'Beverly McLachlin' kept hovering in my mind. The problem is that whenever I blurt something like this out, someone generally says 'um, we're looking for female chief justices, and that's a grunge metal rocker dude who performs in drag'. And I was at a table of really smart people. So I didn't say it. And it was the answer. And I think it would have given us another ten out of ten. (sorry, Lynn)

The one answer that I did know that everyone else didn't was almost as embarrassing, because I had to close my eyes, do a Winnie-the-Pooh 'think think think' routine, stand on my head and count backwards from fifty before I remembered. One guy was looking at me like 'cripes, if it's actually going to make brain matter leak out your ears, never mind then'. (it was Lars Von Trier).
Whatever. The fact is, just getting down there and walking in the door and not bolting back to my car and driving to McDonald's was a huge personal triumph. And the fact that the first category being 'War' and the second category being 'P's' and this not causing anyone to take out a shotgun and start blasting away was just a bonus.

Awesome night, Lynn. Thanks.

In Defense of Lying

I've been saying for the last few weeks that my favourite line from Glee (sorry, still can't figure out how to link to it) is when the Cute Teacher's Psychotic Pregnancy-Faking Wife's Crazy Sister says "Dishonesty is FOOD to a marriage, it will DIE without it". I don't really believe this, of course. But I do think that people who insist that honesty is always the best policy are, well, wrong.

There are different kinds of lies. There are lies you tell to make your own life easier, lies you tell to protect yourself and lies you tell to protect others. Some lies just come out of nowhere. I have one friend who's a veritable Shakespeare of lying -- nothing important (as far as I know), but basically she just does it to keep in practice. A bunch of us were having dinner at a restaurant in Toronto and one friend asked this friend where the washroom was. The Master Liar told her it was towards the back of the restaurant and down the stairs (which was true). The friend immediately stood up, went to the front of the restaurant and started climbing UP the stairs. The rest of us called her back once we got up from rolling under the table laughing.

And the marriage thing. Yes, in a marriage, largely you don't want to be lying your head off every time you open your mouth. You need to be honest about your basic values, how you want to raise your children, whether you just blew a mortgage payment at the casino. But the times when you think "whoa, what's with the hair?" or "you are completely unattractive to me right now" or "Seriously? Some woman actually LIKED that?" Is it helpful or constructive to say any of those things out loud?

I think if you're going to 'be honest', what you're going to say should hurt you more than it hurts the person you tell. To quote another TV figure from a bad medical show (because apparently all I do lately is watch crap on TV), "the truth will set you free, but it usually kicks the crap out of someone else".

When my friend's husband cheated on her and left her, and actually said he'd fallen out of love with her, I was horrified. It was one of the worst things I could imagine, to have the one person who was supposed to love you no matter what turn around and say you know what, all those things you've always worried about, that you're fat, that your feet are weird, that your voice is whiny and you laugh too loud? They're all true, and they've made it impossible for me to love you, and I'm leaving. I was talking on the phone with this friend a few weeks ago, about how honesty even between friends is a mixed blessing. If someone criticizes something that you're already sensitive about, it just feels like your worst fears about yourself have been realized. If they come up with something different, then you're thinking 'holy crap, I hadn't even gotten around to worrying about that -- what else is there?'

I have friends who've sworn they'll never lie to their kids -- about Santa Claus, about dying, about where babies come from. That's fine, it's good to have principles. Personally, I have no qualms about lying to my children. I like them to have a sense of magic, I want to protect them from things that they're too young to understand except as overwhelmingly frightening, and frankly, nobody needs to know where the good chocolate lives except me. One of my friends says she remembers being really angry when she found out that her parents had been lying about Santa. Yeah, okay, they'll get over it. I've never said "no, you will never die", but I have an overanxious boy who tends to brood on things, so I find ways to get around saying, yes, beautiful nine-year-old boys die every day in ugly and unfair ways, because that's not something he needs to know with that kind of immediacy right now. And if I told my daughter what I really think of her cartwheeling ability? Irreparable damage would be done to our relationship.

I don't want you all to think I go around lying with gay abandon. I'm actually a terrible liar. I just don't think The Truth is the panacea some people make it out to be. Sometimes a little dishonesty is the best policy.

And Lynn? Remember I never actually said I was good at trivia :).

Favourite Quotes from Not-Necessarily-Favourite-Books

“I don’t expect that much from God. Maybe I used to. But the older I get, the easier I am on him. God’s getting older, too, I figure.” -- Ten Miles West of Venus, Judy Troy (short story -- spoken by a priest): I like this even though it doesn't really make sense. It says much more about the speaker than it does about God. It makes him the kind of priest whose church I would want to belong to if I still belonged to one.

"The night advanced, the earth rotated on its axis, and they talked about the problem of why a flag in the wind, a stiff current of air, flutters and why the waves in Max’s hair did not move as his hair grew but remained in the same place, just the opposite of the sea, where the waves moved horizontally but the water remained in the same place; and about the war, about Adolf Hitler, whom they called the “A.H.-Erlebnis”; and about the twin daughters of Max Planck, the founder of quantum mechanics: the first gave birth to a daughter and died in childbirth; the other looked after the child and married the widower, became pregnant herself two years later, and also died in childbirth. Added to that, one son died in the First World War, while his second son was shot in the Second. Planck’s constant!" -- The Discovery of Heaven, Harry Mulisch: This was a great, sprawling, metaphysical epic that I'm still not sure I understand. I like this because it's sort of a microcosm of the book's wide range in the conversation between two characters. Also, I had read about the fate of Max Planck's children in A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and thought it was unutterably sad. I guess then I should be offended that it is reduced, here, to a fairly shallow witticism, but I'm not. It's more indicative of how these characters see everything mathematically and can reduce even messy, tangled humanity to equations.

“I’ll tell you the problem with being happy. Because you cannot conceive of ways to make your life better than it already is, you end up repeating yourself: today is a facsimile of yesterday, and tomorrow of today. Slowly, inevitably, the image loses its sharpness. The decline is so predictable, you could chart it mathematically. Euphoria + time = Happiness, Happiness + Time = Contentment, Contentment + Time = complacency, Complacency + Time + Boredom.” -- The Amnesiac, Sam Taylor: How funny, I didn't realize when I put this one down that it's also a mathematical equation for human experience. I just thought it articulated something very well that I've often sensed dimly. Also, it's a way to put a positive spin on a shitty day when the library was way too hot and all the books to be reshelved had to go on the bottom shelf, which makes me feel like my head is going to explode from bending over, which reminds me I really need to lose some weight, and makes me really cranky about all the kids that go around pulling out books on sharks and spiders and paper airplanes and hot rods and volcanoes and NEVER EVER EVER EVER putting them back IN THE RIGHT PLACE... anyway. Clearly I dodged that being-happy-for-too-long bullet today.

“Their photo album alternated between drought and glut. They would add no new pictures for years. Then someone would shoot a dozen exposures of five people hanging around the front door, giving a misleading significance to a moment whose importance, if any, was soon forgotten.” -- Prisoner's Dilemma, Richard Powers: I should write a review of this book, because this doesn't nearly capture it, but the family is crazy and normal at the same time, and doesn't this just say it all about photo albums? Before digital cameras, anyway?

“I can’t see the point of Mozart. Of Mozart I can’t see the point. The point of Mozart I can’t see. See I can’t of Mozart the point. Can’t I of Mozart point the see...I can’t see the point of Mozart... That’s not a tune, that’s an algorithm. An algorithm in a powdered wig.” -- Engleby, Sebastian Faulks: I'm not even sure I really liked this book. It's one of those unreliable-narrator things, quite a departure for this author, and although I don't really object to the unpleasant subject matter, I think some of it could have been done with more subtlety. But this snotty quote by the snotty narrator -- I mean, counterpoint? Get it? F***ing brilliant!

“And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy – and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.” -- The Gathering, Anne Enright: Well, yeah. Again, even though I liked this quote, it doesn't really capture the beautiful bleakness of the book. But almost every other quote had florid descriptions of sexual organs in it. And it's only Thursday.

"This is because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England’s got to give.” -- On Beauty, Zadie Smith: and this is why I love Zadie Smith.