A little light relief

Did you hear the one about the dyslexic agnostic?

He lay awake wondering if his dog exists.

Like Heidi's Grandfather

I want to be a hermit.

Oh yes, I want to live all by myself with a possible dog (but not my current dog, who peed on the floor of our rented house today) and a stack of books and some knitting (but not my current knitting, which I can't finish because I don't have the right sized needles to knit the sleeves) and a car (but not my current car because the motor that makes the warm air magically come in and keep your feet from freezing broke and cost me $250 to fix). I'll keep my kid, cause he's wonderful, but if he could just go somewhere and be quiet for a while that would be great.

I don't want a job (especially not my current job, where people just expect me to magically know things and at which I am both clueless and, today, not very good) and I DEFINITELY don't want a phone and I just want to sit and be alone for a while.

I am reading Peter Mayle and a book written by the mother of one of my students (it was really good) and I just finished some of the trash reading I was talking about earlier which included a freaking happy ending and Love. I hate Love.

But if my life were a book then Love is what I would get, and I wouldn't be able to be a hermit, because people always arrive in books to make the hermit come back to life. And I don't want to come back to life. I just want to read.

I want to be a hermit.

I am Reading Trash, and I Don't Care.

I think that title says it all, don't you?

The other day I got an email from my cousin (hi Court!) who said that sometimes she reads lousy books just to have something to do that doesn't require a lot of thought. Well, I'm here to tell you that I do exactly the same thing. I'm a little self conscious about it, being that I'm keeping track of everything I read and all that, but it is the truth.

Sometimes I read trash.

There are limits, of course. Not too long ago I tried to read a book by this Debbie Macomber character -- a book about knitting, no less! -- but I just could not choke it down. The writing was so bad, the plot was predictable, and the characters were wooden. How do people get away with this stuff? When I think of all the great writers I've read over the years who never had a thing published, it makes me a little crazy.

For example, the guy I went to university with who wrote that if there was one hour left until the end of the world, he would spend that hour waiting for a bus. Why? Because the time passes very slowly, and you're always glad when the bus arrives.

Life is not fair, and that's a fact.

Parlay Voo?

I have 35 students in my grade 8 French class.

I have 26 desks.

Nothing good can come from this.

On the plus side, I'm all moved in, and I even found the little notebook where I keep track of the book list. September 1 saw book #147, "When You Are Engulfed In Flames" by David Sedaris. I love reading books of essays, especially when I don't have the attention span to keep track of characters in a work of fiction.

Speaking of works of fiction, I need to plan something for tomorrow (because 9 hours at work today just WASN'T ENOUGH).

That is all.

Three Minutes from Crazy

Hello, dear reader.

I haven't been here for a while, and let me tell you why:

On Saturday I'm moving, with my boy and the WonderDog, to a smaller place outside the city, where we will await the completion of our lovely new home.

Today I started my new job, where I am 100% of the French department, 50% of the ESL department, and a good chunk of the English Language Arts department. But no pressure or anything.

I am so busy and so worried about absolutely everything that I can hardly see straight, much less blog. You know how when you move, at first you think it's a great idea? Then you start to realize how much work it is, but you're still pretty excited? Then the new place starts to seem REAL to you and you long to be there, and you're frustrated cause you're not? And then how all your stuff (your BOOKS) are in boxes in your mom's garage and someone's come and taken the bookshelves away and moving day is SATURDAY whether you're ready or not and all you want to do is crawl into bed and stay there until it's all just gone away?
Yes, that's where I'm at. Wondering at my sanity, surrounded by boxes, and running out of time.

So anyway, I am three minutes away from crazy, awaiting messages from the mother ship, and needing a general break. I will be back, once everything is sorted and I'm able to breathe again.

Thanks for asking, though.

Writing about... Writing!

I have been spending some time reading about two of my favourite things: language and writing.

I read Mark Abley’s “The Prodigal Tongue” (book #123) and Ruth Wajnryb’s “Expletive Deleted: a good look at bad language” (book #128), as well as “The Maeve Binchy Writers’ Club” (guess who wrote it?) (book #130) and a writing book called “Writing Motherhood” by Lisa Garrigues (which doesn’t have a number yet cause I haven’t finished reading it).

I’m a little addicted to books about how to write. One day I plan to write one myself, in fact. (Maybe not now. My grandmother has told me not to even THINK about making jam this summer because of how busy everything is. I am reminded of the joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.) I think that this addiction to books about writing is a natural offshoot of the addiction to books. Whenever I’m faced with some kind of problem, my first instinct is to research it. Go to the library and get a book! Go to the internet and google it! Read! The information is out there; all I have to do is find it.

So when I wanted to make jam I didn’t ask my mother or my grandmother (except for some help, which my mother offered in the form of these immortal words: “Julie, paranoia will destroy ya.”). Oh, no, dear reader, I went and bought a book. Same with knitting.

I tell myself that buying books on the writing process is an investment. I am a teacher; I teach writing; these books are resources. And they are, certainly. More than that, though, I feel like a prospector. Surely in all this there will be a lump of gold. Surely there will be a secret in here that I didn’t know, which will open to me and my students the gates of the kingdom. Ann Lamott’s writing book, “Bird by Bird” (book #36) did offer me something I didn’t already know, as well as the helpfully descriptive phrase I used on my writing students at the time: “Shitty first drafts.”

As for the books on language, how can anyone fail to be astounded by it? Language is the thing that separates us from the animals: language is the one thing without which virtually no other human endeavour is possible.

Like swearing.

The best part of Wajnryb’s little book (besides the fact that it was five bucks on the remainders table at Chapters) was the chapter subtitles: she’s re-imagined all these critical moments as if the people involved had really spoken – as, in fact, they probably did speak. So we have Joan of Arc quoted as saying “I don’t suppose it’s gonna fucking rain, is it?” and Julius Caesar exclaiming “Fucking hell, Brutus, not you too!”

Mark Abley wrote about how English is changing in an international arena: he says that English is the new Latin, from which all new language will spring. What a wonderful thought. He also introduced me to urbandictionary.com, where new and exciting words are posted every minute (or so it seems) and people can vote, a la Wikipedia, on whether or not they accept those new words as words. Some of the new constructions Abley discusses are things I can’t quite get behind (“Off the lights” instead of “Turn off the lights”) but others are so fresh and so much fun that I kind of hope they catch on. One of the things that struck me about his book was that in every language he discussed there were purists (people not unlike me, I imagine) sitting in the wings and screaming with fear and anger that the holy of holies, the Mother Tongue, was being tampered with. What Abley said was, essentially, that these people can scream all they want, but language is going to change anyway.

To which I now say, foshizzle, man.

Leave me alone, I'm reading.

The lady at Ikea said "Are you moving a LIBRARY?" when I went to buy more book boxes on the weekend.

I just smiled enigmatically.

In other news, the evil Commissionaire was not at the library this morning, when I returned the resume books I got for my students and happened to pick up a couple (okay, three) books about reading.

Books about reading! How delightfully meta.