Thoughts on Leaving

It doesn’t matter that the world is falling down. It doesn’t matter that the mold on the window grows over the view or if I wake up on time or wake up at all. Sleep in; sleep all day. It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter how often I sweep, the dust settles over everything an inch thick.

He says, let’s move. Leave it all, pack only what fits into a suitcase, and store the rest. Head west, the way you’ve always wanted to, the way you never dared, not really, not for keeps.

I can’t clean it all, the rubbish builds up and the grime sticks to all surfaces, oily rainbow reflections that reveal nothing.

As if I could leave all this.

Bags for bookworms

Also worth noting, my new messenger bag from Christy Studio has the perfect book sized pocket! A happy coincidence, especially since I am prone to carting books around until they are… well… less than pristine. It’s also a bright yellow, not that nasty beige it appears to be in the picture. Curse you bad lighting!

Also comes in purple, red, teal, and more. Recommended for the discerning bookworm.

I write to you on my plainest paper

I write to you on my plainest paper, forgoing the flowered stationery and letterpress cards for found items. I don’t care that you don’t write back. It’s better to imagine you carrying my scribbled words along with you, miles away. Here is a playbill for a show I didn’t see and here is a poem I found copied out, that reminds me of the heat, the dustiness of our walks, the way I saw you half-blind, chlorine in my eyes. How I sometimes feel like the edges of a pool, calling you over, grasping at floating things, all of them dead. It doesn’t matter, my day to day, these words are for you and I imagine them read, decades later by curious fans. That’s how famous you’ll be. Here, let me stroke your ego, you like it when I do that, don’t you? Don’t say no, let me undo you, for old time’s sake—surrender. The oven timer’s set, lay down our heads first one then another and another,  xoxo—no—thinking of you—not quite—yours, Lindsay.

The Sweet Tooth

“It’s amazing that you still haven’t read Anna Karenina. And you call yourself an English major.”

“It’s not that I haven’t tried. There’s something about the title that sets me off Karenina… Kar-nin-nin-a. I want to pronounce it like an engine revving. Is that weird? Don’t answer that. Maybe it’s just that I get so much pleasure from imagining that I’ll like it, filling up my bookshelf with things I’m meant to read, someday, when I have the time. Actually sitting down and reading it, getting into the nitty gritty of consuming, well that’s something else altogether. I can’t promise we’ll get along. Me and Tolstoy, I mean. So I put it off. I like the thought of liking him.”

By now she’d stirred three helpings of sugar into her coffee without really thinking about it, one at a time, little granules covered her saucer and the reach of her teaspoon. She paused for a moment mid-flight while she studied her new friend across the table, and then scooped another lump into her cup.

“Of course, I don’t want to be one of those people that reads things just because they’re on a million different lists or worse, avoids things because they are intimidatingly popular. I want to want things in my own time. I hate that I can’t just come to it on my own now, it’s already been claimed as this great classic of the world. What if I hate it? Won’t that say more about me than Tolstoy?”

“Only as much as your sweet tooth says about sugar.”

Book Review: The Spellman Files

The Spellman Files (Books 1-4)

by Lisa Lutz (Simon & Schuster)

My friend T, pushed the first book into my hand, “You’re going to love it.” I was a bit skeptical, I mean this from a lover of Twilight, but she was also the one who made me read Room and The Hunger Games, so I usually give her the benefit of the doubt. Needless to say I consumed the four books in Lisa Lutz’s series like I was eating slices of pizza. I should probably take a break and read something for work but om nom nom, soooo good. It’s not literary genius but it goes down easy and makes you want more. Kind of like crack. Book crack.

Isabel Spellman is a twenty-something private detective born into a family of private detectives, save her perfect older brother who managed to escape into law. If you were ever a fan of the fantastic (and sadly underrated) TV show Veronica Mars, you would probably think being a family of private detectives is full of fun hijinks ala Keith & Veronica, kicking ass and taking names together, a beautiful portrait of a father-daughter bond. Well, when it comes to the Spellmans, it’s a heck of a lot more dysfunctional, but just as hilarious. It’s the Veronica Mars of the future, if they hadn’t prematurely cancelled the show, left a storyline up in the air, and ruined my life.

I digress.

The thing about the Spellman family is that they are very very good detectives and they have no sense of personal space or privacy. This is the theme that pretty much runs through the entire series, that and the side story of how Isabel is horribly immature with a pretty shitty love life, but  to be fair, you would have a hard time hanging onto a guy too if you referred to every one you met as Exboyfriend #[insert here] and had a mother who tailed your dates and constantly tried to backseat drive your life. I guess the lesson here, is that even if families sometimes go too far, they do it out of love… and nosiness… and misguided suspicion. Also, sometimes they have you arrested, just for kicks.

The Spellman Files series is good, quick-reading, fun. You’ll get attached to the family, like a mangy looking stray cat that eats all your food and purrs too loud that your boyfriend brought home and then guilted you into keeping. You’ll also learn a lot of life lessons without actually having to live them, like everything is negotiable, or, if you think you’re being followed you probably are, and if you want something the best way to get it isn’t to be direct, but to manipulate and con your way into getting it. I’ve already implemented some of these into my own life. Zen and the art of the Spellmans.

The newest book in the series, Trail of the Spellmans comes out February 28, 2012, and by my own sleuthing (T may have tipped me off) a movie version is in development (please let them cast Kristen Bell). Veronica Mars seasons 1-3 are available on dvd, do yourself a favour and watch them if you haven’t already.

Reading a Smile

They say your eyes were closed the first time you smiled but they’re wide open now, shining, and I can’t tell if you’re delighted or just scared. Your teeth are clenched but you do that sometimes, when you’re excited, sometimes when you don’t know what to say.

So, I’m hesitating because you might be hesitating and the box in my palm is still firmly closed, frozen. My knee hurts and I remember, now, that I haven’t swept yet like you asked me to yesterday. I just know, when I stand up I’ll be a one-legged lint trap.

But, tell me. Tell me yes. Tell me you want to get frustrated with each other every week for another   fifty years, sixty if we’re lucky. Tell me you want to believe I’ll follow through even if sometimes I don’t. Or, don’t say anything, just let that half-smile teeter into a grin. I’ll know.

 

This one was supposed to be for drabblerousers but it turns out the word limit is 100 not 150. Shit fuck damn. We’ll get ‘em next time boys. (Sorry Peter).

Book Review: Anthropology of an American Girl

Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel by Hilary Thayer Hamann

Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

(Spiegel & Grau)

Its 640 pages read like 120. I’ve never been so captivated by a novel, so simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by a character before. Anthropology of an American Girl spans the senior year of high school and college years of Eveline Auerbach as she comes into her femininity, cultivates her sexuality, falls in love with a teacher’s assistant, and marries the consequences of her actions.

Told in parts, the way you might divide your own life, the before and after of being in love, of moving, of living in stages. A study of a girl’s heart which, at times, can be misleading just as it is achingly honest. How we betray but find truth in our betrayal until we don’t can’t. Regrets piled up precariously on slender shoulders and the knowledge that always, we are being watched, assessed.

“It was confusing, frankly, the way everyone stared at our bodies even as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We are supposed to get over ourselves, but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage—the surest means to success, the surest course to failure.”

American Girl dredges up the real substance of youth, we are and were not the happy-go-lucky misfits of Glee or the scripted reality of MTV shows, there is violence, depravity, intellectual blooming, addiction, despair. Thayer Hamann doesn’t shy away from any of it, allowing her characters to navigate her world as we do ours, stumbling, searching, grasping.

Her real power, though, is in the access to Eveline’s thoughts. While the character doesn’t seem to say much of anything she feels enormously and we are privy to a perception of the world that is both new and poignant. It doesn’t matter so much that Evie lacks agency, allowing herself to become a pathetic shell of a woman passed from man to man, bartered and sold, because as an artist she lives in her head and her thoughts are beautiful and tragic, delicate as she falls into a dangerous depression and strong when she finds the will to live outside her mind, manipulate her way out of the situation she’s trapped herself in. Because, that’s the most apt portrayal of all, isn’t it? The hardest cages to escape from are the ones we build ourselves.

Read it. Then read it again.