Books -2, -1, 0, 1

 Firing up the old typewriter because I Finished A Book Today! But first, some of the books I finished in the last few weeks before the official start of Project Read Some Books (I should come up with a name...)

Book #-2, The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

I read this on my phone, which normally would be supremely uncomfortable, but the book was so good that I didn't really feel it to be so. For context, about a year ago I was at a personal crossroads regarding my marriage and life in general; one day, sitting at my desk at work, I read some of S. Plath's poetry (the beekeeping series) and it resonated clearly with how I felt about myself. The image of the feeble queen bee ("Is she dead, is she sleeping?") suddenly reborn into a powerful figure, I felt I was reading about myself and my future. Sappy, maybe, but this is kind of expected of impactful moments like this one.

Anyway, a few months later I started The Bell Jar and loved it. It is heavily dated in its context (it has 1953 written all over –through?– it), but the inner struggle of the character is timeless. The process of sinking into depression was perfectly captured. I suppose it might feel a little different for different people, but when I was in my late teens, the growing feeling of unease, of disconnectedness, of knowing something is wrong but thinking it must be something external, that if you could just find out what it is and fix it– I remember feeling all of that.

And then to boot, I was reading this book when I found out that my friend Mike died. Myself and three other friends decided to go to a cabin a few hours away from the city, eat some mushrooms, and hopefully have a cool time. We arrived on Friday, settled in, and planned to eat the shrooms on Saturday. Come Saturday morning, I woke up before anyone else but because the floors of the cabin were stupid and creaky, I stayed in bed reading The Bell Jar. While I was at the part where she's doing her internship, I got a text from my (ex)husband informing me that Mike (by then a mutual friend) was gone.

Against my better judgement, I had some shrooms anyway and had an awful time; after a few hours one of my friends (S.) noticed I was spiraling. He took me to a river and I was finally able to laugh and laugh and laugh for the rest of the day. All four of us walked in a meadow and saw cows, rock, plants, the sky, and just laughed and laughed at everything. Then on Sunday, two of us (A. and I, the two who were friends with Mike) left early to go to a church service in his memory.

The next Monday, I "worked" from home but really just stayed in bed and finished reading The Bell Jar.

My friend M. later sent me pictures from when we were in the meadow and said "It was nice to see you so happy".

I didn't realize I had so much to say about Sylvia Plath, but there it is.

Oh, I later read her short story "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom" and found it trite. The Bell Jar, though, was fantastic.

Book # -1, Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut

This book is obviously excellent and there's not much I can say about it that hasn't been said already, except my own experience with it. This was a re-read; I think I must have read it in 2018 or 2019. This time around I read it in Puebla, on a weekend trip with friends in which (among other things) we went to a paleontological site.

Anyway, I was sitting by the pool in the bizarrely architected house we rented, reading this book. (Actually, this was also before anyone else had got up; a disturbing pattern as I never considered myself a morning person, but I guess I have aged into being one.). When I first read it years ago, what jumped out at me was the idea of small chemical imbalances (or other tiny processes) affecting behavior; but what got me thinking this time was that the book dwells a lot on how ideas (or lack of ideas) determine what is even possible for people to do. And as I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to be more intentional with what ideas I let into my mind. So this book contributed quite a bit to the Read Some Books project.

Book #0: K2, Triumph and Tragedy, by Jim Curran

This book was written not long after the "Black Summer" of 1982 on K2, where a fuckton of expeditions were made to the mountain, and a whole lot of people died. After a bit of a slow start, I actually found this book very interesting and informative, not just about the Black Summer in general but also about K2 and mountaineering expeditions in general. Or at least, about how traditional mountaineering expeditions were in the 80s.

It did grate me the wrong way that he consistently referred to adult, accomplished women climbers as "the girls", and to members of the Korean expeditions simply as "the Koreans", whereas every white man is called by name. If I summit K2 I would like to be called by my name also, please.

After reading the book, I watched "The Last First: Winter K2" (highly interesting), and having read the book, I was able to understand and appreciate the documentary much more.

Book #1: The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut

This took me a while to get through (a couple months or so) because it was the book I kept in my work backpack, and I only read it at the office. But I finally finished it today.

This is maybe the fourth or fifth Vonnegut novel I've read. It might be the one I've enjoyed the least, but it is still fascinating and worth a read. The central idea about the meaning(lessness) of life, free will, and destiny are obviously never going to get old.

I did find it to be a bit of a slow start, but easy to read and pretty interesting. 

Enough time

I was thinking to myself, "Remember that time I wanted to read 100 books in a year (but then had to settle for 50)? And I blogged about it? I should do that again, and I should start a SubStack to write about the books". 

But why start a SubStack when I have a perfectly good Blogger.com blog already set up? The same blog, in fact, where I had already logged (blogged?) the 100 50 Books Project over a decade ago.

So I am taking this blog off the shelf and dusting it off; that's 14 years of dust! Enough time to move house five times, finish a bachelor's degree, get a PhD, change careers, get married, and then separate (we haven't divorced). Enough time to develop a smartphone addiction, enough time to decide to beat it, and enough time to buy a bunch of books because you are tired of Big Tech* worming into your brain and deciding what you pay attention to 24/7, and what you think about when when you are not looking at your stupid little screen. The plan behind the books being, obviously, that you will read those books instead of scrolling.**

Enough time, in short, to now be the average mid-30s person.

After I decided not to open a new blog and instead use the old one, I went back and clicked randomly through the archives. Enough time has passed that I had forgotten many of the things I wrote about, but it's weird that I can tell I wrote them. Enough time has passed, too, that it's no longer cringey to me. Instead I read what I wrote and just find it funny, as if someone else had written them, and that person just happens to share an inside joke or two with me. 

After clicking through the blog I logged in to write this entry, and found a bunch of abandoned draft posts. A good portion of them seem to be written from the bottom of the Pit Of Despair, sponsored by my PhD. My knee-jerk reaction is to NOT read those drafts, because it has not been Enough Time. It also seems that at some point I went back and un-published some entries which I might have found embarrassing. I am trusting my previous self's judgement and also decided not to read those now-drafts.

I turned 34 last week and was suddenly gripped by the impulse to have Some Projects. You know, "I did X every day for a year", or "Doing 5000 pull-ups this year", or... something. I suppose my project for age 33 turned out to be a triple whammy: go back to therapy, end the marriage, finally learn what I should have already known about taxes & savings. So, you know, all good stuff; but it would be nice to actually plan something for 34 instead of suddenly realizing I'm having an emotional crisis and dealing with it on the fly****. 

And I've been chipping away at my screen time / book balance for a few weeks already, and thought, why not formalize it? This is one place where I will choose to funnel my energy.

Anyway.

Anyway...

Anyway, I really had no reason to write this piece at all, because I haven't finished my first book since turning 34. But maybe I can cheat a bit, and write about some books I finished in the past few weeks, when I was a 33 year old child. I'll write about those next; but in the meantime, I'm using this post to metaphorically clear my throat.

Also, I'm not proofreading this. I don't think I have the mental energy just now.

* Tired of Big Tech, but also hoping my Big Tech stock does well because I'd like to retire, please.

** Books are morally superior to short videos. No, just kidding. Obviously I thought about why books > reels; besides the slower rate of information consumption, you have more control about what to read*** i.e. what ideas you choose to think about. And also I remembered with nostalgia staying up until 2 AM in my bedroom at my parents' house because I just couldn't put my book down. Granted that book was probably Confessions of a Shopaholic and not Anna Karenina... but a book is a book is a book, I guess? And books are morally superior to short videos... (Da Capo al Fine!).

*** Obviously our book choices are also affected by algorithms-- what books you hear about or find at a bookshop -- but these algorithms will be enough levels removed to be acceptable (not that one has much choice).

**** Only this isn't my first rodeo, so my grownup version of dealing with a crisis on the fly was to write an email to my old therapist from my grownup work computer, and then have some grownup conversations with a few people, and figure things out calmly and without judgement.

Empty nest

My mom and sister went to visit my other sister in Canada, so it's just my dad and me at home. And the dogs, of course. And the cleaning lady, occasionally, plus her daughter and her daughter's son who plays on the Wii and lurks in corners*. Empty nest.

So I've been watching things with my dad. We watched two movies the other day, and I watched him fix the dining room table's wobbly leg, and I watched him look at his computer while we ate, and he watched me play (and lose at) Mario Kart.

Yesterday he and I also went to the market to buy supplies for our contribution to the family Christmas lunch/dinner. We bought ingredients to make stuffed poblano peppers. My grandma called on Friday and when I answered the phone she said,

"Hello? Señora?"
"No, grandma, it's me, Lalli."
"Señora, I was wondering if you could make some stuffed poblano peppers for Monday."
"Um, okay, but I'm Lalli."
"...oh, Lalli!"

I gave the phone to the cleaning lady and she said, "It's for your dad."

My dad was on the phone for about fifteen seconds before saying goodbye and hanging up, then turning to the cleaning lady and saying that it was my grandma asking if she could make some poblano chiles. It struck me as very roundabout.

Monday (today) is the 24th and the cleaning lady said she could do it very speedily in the morning and then go home to her own family, so my dad and I bought all the stuff to make it quicker for her.

We also got a piñata and some candy. The piñata was big and bulky, and we had to stuff it into a taxi to get it home. A few peaks got a little bent and some of the crêpe paper tassels stayed behind in the taxi, but it ended up fine in the end. Maxie sniffed it when we got home, but kept walking away and pointedly ignoring it when I tried to take her photo with it. In the end I had to bribe her with a piece of rawhide and even then she wasn't cooperating. I pointed at a spot right next to the piñata and was all, "Sit!". Maxie gave me a puzzled look, like "But... there's a spiky thing where you're pointing. I'm gonna sit over here so I'm not next to it.". I picked it up and moved it a little closer to her and she got up and walked her tail right over to the porch. That dog.

*Well, whenever I see him it's because he's popped around a corner. I never walk into a room and see him already in it; he's always on the move, that kid.

Curve

My previous smugness has morphed into boredom. Not with my life (average) but with the Internet. Don't you ever get bored? It seems I always end up in an Internet rut, finding myself time and time again on the same time of websites.

Looking over my browsing history from the last three days, about two-thirds of it is homework-related stuff ("Regeneration in compound eyes of Crustacea", for example) and the rest is a mix of recipe blogs, articles, movie summaries and trailers, English tabloids*, nutrition and muscle-building advice, videos of meerkats, social networks and snark forums.

Do you see how much wasted time that is?!

"Wasted" is relative, I suppose. Obviously any amount of time that I spend browsing around is benefitting me in some way, otherwise I wouldn't do it. But there's a point where the cost of time invested exceeds the benefit of stress-relief and entertainment.

I borrowed a cost-benefit curve from here. I don't know why it's talking about hamburgers, but imagine that the benefit is entertainment and the cost is time– a limited resource. See, the point of maximum returns isn't the point where the benefits and the costs cross near the top. The optimum is much lower, where the distance between the lines is greatest (at the mark of two hamburgers, in the above graph). You get the most returns for your investment.

This post started out making sense to me, but it's degenerated into a messy unloading of the brain. Also, I've always like cost and benefit curves. There's just something about them that appeals to me, and I suspect it's to do with my laziness. You do best when you don't give it your all.

I remember the first time I came across them was during a talk this one guy gave us about overfishing by individual fishermen and small (local) fisheries. People were fishing to the point where the cost and benefit curves intersected, and he said that he had been frustrated when he'd first started working on the problem, from a conservation point of view. Didn't the fishermen understand that if they overexploited the fish, they'd have no more resources in the future? How could he make them see? And then someone told him something, and it changed his entire perspective on fish and many other things: The fishermen weren't stupid. They knew the species they were fishing would die out. But they needed money, and they needed it NOW.

And with that, I say good night.

P.S. I saw a movie the other day where it was pointed out that mexicans have an ideal that you're not worthy of happiness until you've suffered enough to deserve it. I think this applies to many cultures, not just mine. I mean, religion. Right? GUILT!

That was disjointed. I could probably make that fit together, but I want to go to sleep. Use your imagination.

It got me thinking. It also reminded me of the time when I got all frustrated and said, "Why've I got to be happy, anyway? What's so great about being happy?" and my psychologist metaphorically patted my head and said that happiness isn't overrated and to calm down.

Smug

I feel snarky today. Snarky in a way that makes me feel happy and smug, not snarky-frustrated.

One of those times when I get tired of people complaining about how bad everything is and figure, what the hell, all I can do is what's best for me. At this point that means doing my Math homework and not eating any more graham crackers. These are easy things to do, because the homework is some easy-peasy limits and we ran out of graham crackers because I ate them all.

See?

Damn, I really feel good today.

I joined a new gym with about ten different instructors. The Wednesday guy is very good, one of the Thursday guys is good, the Monday girl is okay and everyone else oscillates between passable and really bad (Friday girl). Also, pushups are kinda dangerous because the gym floor gets incredibly slippery when it gets sweaty. My knees slide around in an entertaining way, but I don't want to do full push-ups because one of my hands might slide off to the side and I'd end up like Michael Jackson.

Of course, I could bring a yoga mat, but I'm too lazy to bring one with me on the bus at 6 AM.

Isn't it funny, though, that I'm early for the 7 AM classes at the gym, but was late for every single 7:30 AM History of Biology class? Well, maybe not funny. Telling, I guess.

I've been doing my nails a lot lately. Right now I'm wearing sparkles, only half of each nail chipped off and I have yet to re-do them.

I stubbed my two tiniest toes a few hours ago. The pinky still hurts, but luckily my nails are intact. I knew a girl whose foot slipped when her knee gave out (there's something wrong with her knees and apparently they do that every so often; she said she's had many surgeries, but will inevitably end up in a wheelchair by the time she's… I forgot how old. Maybe 35?) and her big toe's entire nail came right off. Augh! So I treasure my pinky toe's nail, although actually there isn't much of it. If I clip it, it's about 3mm long. But it's there, make no mistake.

Okay, Math.

Right.

Non sequitur

I didn't mean for this to come out feeling bland, but I guess that's how I feel at the moment.

I was doing some homework this week about neurotransmitters. It was funny. As I read about serotonin and depression, I was like, "Holy crap, this was me yesterday!". Horrible morning, slept all afternoon, woke up at night feeling better.

I love my Behavioral Ecology class, but the annoying thing about trying to talk about it is that within a minute many people veer the conversation over to humans and human behavior. Yes, humans are fascinating. But don't try to make comparisons between humans and other animals if you don't understand the animals you're talking about in the first place. Like in a book I read recently, where the characters had a long conversation about lions and lionesses and female power and it was mostly founded on a bunch of false assumptions they made about lions. If you want to talk about humans, then talk about humans. Don't drag lions into it and start making up fantastical analogies just because you think they sound cool.

I really am a stick in the mud sometimes. I was just thinking about that today. I was on the bus and I saw a kid reach into his book bag, pull out a microfiber cloth, pick some lint off of it and then wipe his glasses on it very carefully. "Kid," I thought at him, "there's a fuzzy hoodie on your lap. No need to be carrying around your microfiber thingy. Don't be a stick in the mud."

I think about this a lot, sometimes. It's very comforting:

I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of people with goiters. So did Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer who is the hero of this book. Those unhappy Earthlings had such swollen thyroid glands that they seemed to have zucchini squash growing from their throats.

All they had to do in order to have ordinary lives, it turned out, was to consume less than one-millionth of an ounce of iodine every day.

My own mother wrecked her brains with chemicals, which were supposed to make her sleep.

When I get depressed, I take a little pill, and I cheer up again.

And so on.

So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

It's from Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut. I added the emphasis so you'd know which parts to pay attention to, just in case you were temped to focus especially on the bit about goiters.

Every time I go to the study room next to the library I fall asleep. All the warm air rises up into that room, but it doesn't get too hot as the day goes on because there's a dome that the hottest air goes to. Today I was nodding off when a classmate from a few semesters ago sat at my table and talked to me so I wouldn't fall asleep. He told me he ate 16 tacos for lunch, which explains how he can run so much and be so skinny. Seriously, what little there is of his body is in great physical condition and he's known for running on and on, fast, and never getting tired.

Clutter

My family accumulates things. The fridge accumulates tiny containers of dipping sauce which nobody will eat. We save the ketchup and chili sauce packets that come with pizza, even though none of us eat them. We have tons of keychains. We have tons of books. We have fifteen-year-old elementary-school textbooks. We have tangles of toys crammed into a plastic storage box under the stairs. We must have around a hundred mugs. And there are uncountable decorative bowls, vases, plates, figurines and other souvenirs.

Be it by nature or nurture, I have a tendency to obtain and accumulate things (Star Wars toys, amusing pillows and odd bits of nature extracted from their homes during field trips** all come to mind) and am averse to throwing them away. Luckily for me, I seem to be less averse than my parents, who once yelled at me for not eating the corners of a slice of cake.

Two weeks ago, I felt suddenly overwhelmed by how much stuff I had and threw out two trash bags' worth of stuff from my room, which was promptly picked over by the housekeeper. This means that a stuffed toy, a plastic CD case and other such items are now on display in the laundry room (which is of her domain, as she uses it a lot more than anyone else does).

All my old Star Wars toys (and there were many of them), anime figurines, a music box, a poster I never got framed are in storage; a lot of my ex-clothes is being put to use by other people (I only have one metal band T-shirt left!), I threw out a bunch of useless knickknacks, relocated a table elsewhere in the house, dusted everything…

…and I am still swimming in stuff, but at least it is now mostly things that I want and use.

Still, I've been bitten by the decluttering bug. Today I attacked some common areas and threw out what felt like 12kg of old magazines, threw out a bunch of garbage that has been lurking for who-knows-how-many years un the bottoms of decorative vases that lay, concealed and forgotten, behing potted plants, and amassed two dozen or so decorative bowls.

Why do we have so many bowls? They just sit stacked on a shelf and gather dust and lost earrings. And that's just the ones that were in two rooms downstairs– in the display cabinets upstairs there are bowls all the way back o every shelf, and more bowls stacked in the cupboards underneath. When I asked my Dad if there was any one that he felt comfortable getting rid of, he pointed at one shaped like a green pig (it's not as kitschy as it sounds, it's actually quite nice) and then suggested I wrap up all the others and put them in storage because they're pieces of art.

In storage? Where? What for??

AUUUGH! I am ridding myself of the habit of accumulating things, even small, insignificant things like pen holders.

Oh, I didn't mention the pen holders, did I? We have a lot of those, too. But my Dad's tools of the trade are pen and paper (well, that and a few Apple products) so the pen holders are actually put to use. They're all over the house, on nearly every end table and desk. There's enough of them to be on every one, but some desks are selfish and can have three or four pen holders so there aren't enough to go around.

You know, there's something extra odd about having so many decorative things tucked away and piled on top of each other– none of them are actually hung up on a wall or anything. At most they sit, bunched together like merchandise in a shop, on top of a surface such as the piano. Maybe if we set some of them up properly, people would finally feel the house is "decorated" and stop bringing more things into the house.

Weekend project.

** By which I mean things like a walnut shell, or a giant mushroom which my teacher had harvested and was going to throw out. You know, not stuff like a ghost crab for a pet or anything.