Category Archives: Life

I can’t imagine living without books.

Book lover, collector turns silo into unusual library

The article’s about a guy who turned an old silo into a three-storey library with a spiral staircase in the middle. Too cool. But I loved this quote:

“I can’t imagine living without books. If I go out to dinner at someone else’s home, and they don’t have books visible, I wonder if I want them as friends,” said Barbara Farnsworth, an antiquarian bookseller in West Cornwall, Conn.

It’s so true! I always find it disturbing to be in a house that lacks books. Like, do I have anything in common with these people? I remember a time I was house-sitting, and I kept wandering around the house thinking “something’s not right” but not clueing in to what it was, and then I realized. No books! I gasped. I did another circuit of the house to check and make sure, but no, it was true. Not a single one! I was quite literally shocked.

I also find it disturbing when a house lacks living things other than people (i.e. plants and/or pets) and personal mementos (not tchotchkes, but photographs and other items of personal significance). Without those things, it seems like a hotel room, not a home.

When I was in my last year of high school I babysat for this “rich” family. (I put in rich in quotations because it turned out they were in fact living beyond their means. ) Anyhow, I’d never seen anything like the house they lived in. I mean, not the house itself, it was typical for the neighborhood. But the interior. It had clearly been “done” by a decorator. Everything matched, from the furniture to the paint colors to the accessories (they were clearly accessories, not personal items). For instance, there was a white baby grand piano in the living room. I’m sure no one in that house played piano. There was never anything out of place, no magazines on the coffee table or toys on the floor or anything like that. It was stunning. And completely sterile. The only room I felt comfortable in was the unfurnished playroom (the room builders call the “bonus” room) that held all the kids’ toys. After the perfection of the rest of the house, it was delightfully messy.

Sluggish

This week has been a let-down after last week’s excitement. Making progress on several things, but slowly, ever so slowly. Or so it seems. Feeling sluggish. Must snap out of it.

Sent this month’s preliminary notifications yesterday. Drafted my AB article that’s due next week. It’s way too long, of course. And probably super-boring. But at least I have something to work with.

Ran for an hour last night.

Realized I can make PDFs (with OpenOffice). Um… cool! How did I not know this before? Good to know.

Something “more”

Teen spirit

When [girls] pick up Forever, her hallmark folksy, first-person voice eases their transition into the book’s more adult world, conveying subliminally the idea that sex is not something “other” – and therefore to be feared – but something “more”; the logical next step on the ladder to adulthood.

I always liked Judy Blume, despite the fact that I never understood Margaret and her friends in Are You There God? (I thought they were insane.) Anyhoo. Never owned a copy of Forever (or any other Blume books that I can recall, though I read them all), so I can’t reminisce about where I hid mine. That’s not a slight. For as much as I read, I really owned very few books as a pre-adult. Most were library books or borrowed. Forever was borrowed. It got passed around my junior high until everyone who wanted to had read it. Who it actually belonged to, I don’t remember, if I ever knew.

Blume now finds herself in the rather curious position of being, as she herself puts it, “one of the most banned writers in America” …

What I find fascinating about Judy Blume is how her books are always on those “most-banned” lists. In fact, most of the authors on those banned lists are YA authors. I find that amusing because I started reading novels-written-for-adults when I was about 10. Nothing a teen novel could throw at me was particularly revelatory. I don’t even particularly remember much about the plot of Forever (I think there was a ski trip?). What I remember is that dog-eared paperback being passed around the school.

PB

That’s personal best, not peanut butter.

28:16 in the 5K I ran today. Knocked more than 2 minutes off last year’s time in the same event and smashed that pesky 30 minute barrier. As they say, w00t!

(mmm, peanut butter)

Not Dead Yet

So as you can see, I’m not dead yet (TM Monty Python), even though you might have suspected it was so from my lack of posting. I just lost the urge to post random meanderings.

I’ve been thinking about the blogs I like and how most of them focus on something, be it law or writing or pop culture or whatever. And I was also thinking about how I’ve always been a pretty lame journaler. The “write whenever” model just doesn’t work for me. It ends up being, in practice, the “write when you feel guilty for not writing” model. And that’s no fun.

I need structure. A plan, a goal, a deadline. Something. Some kind of carrot. There doesn’t have to be a huge reward involved or anything. It seems like if I decide I’m going to do something, then I do it. “It” just needs some concreteness about it. I mean, I did NaNoWriMo last November, all 50 thousand words of it. When I decided I was going to do the Sun Run, I didn’t miss a single training session from January – April. Etcetera. I have stick-to-it-iveness.

So, I’d like to structure this blog more like a column–which maybe is not properly bloggy, but if it gets me writing, so what–have a goal of writing a set number of words on a set day (or days) of the week on a set subject. My dilemma, what I’ve been mulling over, is what my focus should be. So far I’ve eliminated:
*law (other people do that much better than I ever could)
*writing about writing (save that for TC)
*posting fiction excerpts / writing about fiction projects (kills my momentum)
*random meanderings (zzzzz. I’d like there to be a point…)

A few ideas I haven’t yet tossed: a memoir-y type thing. This is something I’ve wanted to do, and getting bits & pieces down would help sort out the theme, I think. I do feel a bit squishy about doing something like that, but I suppose I have to get over myself at some point. Or I could trade squishy-ness for dullness and do something dry & intellectual with the links in my Bloglines clippings folder. And then there are the miscellania: books, running, food, TV, that sort of stuff. Hmm. So much fodder, so little time…

Done, done, done.

Ah, this is what you like to see when you log into the “view graduation application” section of the SSC:

Application Status Graduation Approved

Yes, folks, it’s true. Law school: complete. Yay, me!

Would you read your child’s diary?

I started tidying up this afternoon and ended up doing a major clean. Well, the place needed it. And my wrist needed a break from outlining. I was slathering it in A535 just to keep going. Even though the touchpad can be used ambidextrously (yay), the right one always ends up hurting more because the page up/down and arrow keys are on the R-hand side. Hmm. Not to mention enter and backspace and delete.

Would you read your child’s diary? I’ve thought about it quite a bit. Not that I have kids, but it’s one of those big moral dilemma questions. What I’ve come up with is that it’s not something I’d do as a matter of course “oh, my kid has a diary, therefore I will read it.” For one thing, I wouldn’t want to do it, and then pretend I hadn’t—give the kid a false sense of privacy. That’s just nasty. And so… basically you get one shot. You read it once, you tell him/her you read it and that’s it. The kid’s either a) going to stop writing; b) continue writing but fill the pages with fiction; c) find a better hiding place. You’ve also lost—or seriously damaged—your kid’s trust in you, because you’ve not invaded his/her privacy for any particular reason. And I don’t think “because I’m your parent and therefore I have the right to know everything you’re thinking” cuts it. Because you’re penalizing/punishing kids who write. The kid who doesn’t write doesn’t get the same treatment. The message the kid gets is not going to be “my parent is looking out for me.” It’s going to be “if I want to keep something private, I can’t write it down.” That said, if there was a reason to be concerned about the kid’s well-being, then perhaps diary-reading may be warranted. I wouldn’t rule it out. But I think the kid would have to have given me reason to be worried about him/her. It’s a line between temptation/curiosity and purpose/genuine concern. Save the one-shot diary read for when it’s really warranted. When the benefits outweigh the costs. If your kid is basically a good kid, I can’t help but think that more harm will be done by showing you don’t trust him/her. Like, why bother being good if no one believes I really am. If they think I’m bad, well, then I really will be bad. The other thing is… when does it stop? When do you no longer have even the theoretical right? I think part of the dilemma lies in that in the beginning parents have total control over their children—they’re dependent on them for everything. But by the time the child is writing their thoughts down in a diary, the parent has already lost a good chunk of their control, not necessarily externally—mom or dad is still in charge of when the kid can do what, but internally—the kid is thinking for him/herself. The diary may be the first manifestation of this. So there’s that realization: “my kid’s doing something I have no control over!” which has to be scary. But there it is. You can’t stop it. It happens.

Of course, this may all be a moot point in the future with blogs and all. I think people tend to self-edit in online journals / diaries / blogs, though. Of course, I self-edited way back when in my paper journal I kept when I was teenager. I always wrote with the awareness that someone might read it. Even though I always buried it at the bottom of a drawer. But there was a lot of stuff I never wrote about back then. I spun stuff quite frequently too, to make it sound better or more exciting or whatever. I didn’t want anyone to read it; I would have been mortified. And it’s not that there was anything “bad” in it. I don’t buy the “a person who’s done nothing wrong has nothing to hide” argument either. I hadn’t done anything illegal or risque. In fact, most often my entries were about how my life was hopeless because it didn’t involve anything illegal or risque. It’s just that it was personal. It was something I had control over (think about it: diary or eating disorder?). It was my hell. And someone else reading about it wouldn’t have made it better. Especially my mom reading it wouldn’t have made it better because her teenagerhood was pretty much the exact opposite of mine. It’s part of the reason mine was so hard. It’s not her fault, but it just wouldn’t have made it better for her to say “I read your diary I feel your pain” because she didn’t. She may have felt pain but it wasn’t my particular brand of social outcast pain. So.

Enough. Got teenagers on my brain I guess because I’m working on CSS. McKenna’s not an outcast though. Well, I guess she’s a pseudo-outcast at the beginning. But she’s not really. She’s just out of her element. Has to learn to swim. Does M have a diary? Definitely not before the beginning of the story. She never had a reason to. But maybe somewhere along the way. I don’t know about a traditional “diary” though. Songwriting, I used to think. If I could write a decent lyric that might work. We’ll have to see.

Reading Break

I have managed to do next-to-nothing school-wise over reading break. Not sure if this is good or bad. It could be good, but only if I can manage to break free of my inertia and start powering up for exams in April. I am starting to feel a bit anxious, but not about exams. It’s about my paper that I don’t have a topic for yet. I need to get cracking on that.

I picked up Stephen King’s On Writing (the hardcover version) off the remainder table at Chapters on Wednesday for $7. Original price: $37. Everyone who’s read it says it’s great, so I assume it’s definitely worth the 7 bucks.

I did read this week, just not law. Recreational reading (Asta’s Book by Barbara Vine), imagine that. And I finished my decisions for the ezine. As we become more established, I’m finding we’re getting a lot less outright crap, and a lot more middle-of-the-road stuff. I think that’s a good sign, but it makes it harder to make decisions. Still only getting about one piece each time that I give an outright “yes” to on first read. I just realized it’s a leap year. Nice. Means I get an extra day to set up the ezine. Getting the March one done on time is always a challenge because February is so short, so that’s a help.

So I have an hour before my next class…

…and I’m charging up my laptop in the library. I could/should be working on my AB article or starting to read/critique Mac’s novel, but… [insert barely contained excitement over wireless internet here] …instead I am doing the “wow, this is so cool” dance. I’m such a procrastinator.