I totally didn't mean to publish that last post

I was writing on Sunday night and had been interrupted about a million times. I didn't even have my thoughts organized yet. I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to publish what I wrote. The more I think about it, I know nothing about sports, aside from some random facts that have slipped into my subconscious after 15 years of watching Sports Center against my will. Anyway, I came on today to find out how far behind I had fallen in my book reviews (four books) and imagine my surprise when it was up there. I guess that Eddie hit publish the other night as he was turning off the laptop. Thanks, to the commenters, for not calling me an idiot. Because that post sure reads like I'm an idiot.

In other news, my parents are moving to rural Minnesota and bought a house up there last week. School has been out for almost a month and all four of my children are still alive. Maren is sitting and starting to crawl. I'm doing my first sprint triathlon next weekend. We'll be gone on our zoo tour of the midwest for a week in July, followed up by 10 days in Utah. We'd stay longer, but my in-laws are remodeling and apparently don't want us. Isaac is potty-trained (mostly), and the mostly is adding to the reason why my in-laws don't want us around any longer. Life is pretty decent-- at least it's as good as it gets in the summer around here. I'm hot-- what can I say?

--originally published 6/22/07

Spotty sports knowledge

It's Father's Day, so we're doing the traditional Father's Day thing in our house-- watching the final round of the US Open. And, as often happens when we watch sports, my spotty sports knowledge became very evident.

For example, I know some interesting and random facts about Tiger Woods, including that he always wears red on Sunday, that he married Jesper Parnevik's former nanny (you know, Yes-purr, who wears his baseball cap with the bill tilted up), and that he hasn't recently won a tournament when he was more than one stroke back going into the final day. I know I'd rather look at Tiger's cut physique than at Phil's man boobs. But ask me about the mechanics of golf and I'm totally clueless. I couldn't tell the difference between a wood and an iron to save my life.

Similarly, my explanation of how football works (to my mother, who has absolutely no interest in sports) is "the little guys run around while the big guys fight each other"

--originally published 6/17/07

I've got my mojo back

My reading mojo, that is. I'm now back on track to read more than 50 books this year. Of course, at this time last year, I had read more like 40, but I didn't have a baby last year, and I spent a lot of last spring moaning on my bed with a book in my hand.

Anyway, just thought you all should know.

--originally published 6/11/07

Book #25: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante quoting butcher in Tuscany

Title: Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante quoting butcher in Tuscany


Author: Bill Buford


I'd love to go back through my reading list for the last two years and figure out how many food-related memoirs and other books I've read. I'm guessing it's somewhere between 8 and 10, and every one of them has been so entertaining. If I were an academic, and not just an armchair academic, I'm sure that I'd be making food writing my area of emphasis. Maybe it's just because I've been trying to get skinny for the last few months and I've been living vicariously through my books when it comes to food.


Regardless of the reason, Heat is a fantastic book. Bill Buford, a writer for the New Yorker and an acquantaince of Food Network chef Mario Batali, decides to write an article about working in the kitchen of Babbo, Batali's flagship restaurant. His time in the kitchen turns into a year-long internship, after which he moves to Italy to apprentice to a pasta-maker and a butcher. I loved his story, and I also loved seeing his journey-- becoming more than just a food lover who can throw a good dinner party. I was excited to see that he's now at work on a book about French cuisine. I wonder how Batali (hater of all things French) feels about that.


--originally published 6/11/07

Book #26: The Thirteenth Tale

Title: The Thirteenth Tale


Author: Diane Setterfield


If you like an engrossing novel, with lots of twists, great characters, excellent writing, moors, missing twins, and tortured narrators, The Thirteenth Tale is a great read. Margaret Lea, an aspiring biographer, is called to tell the life story of Vida Winter, England's greatest living novelist. But the tale Winter tells forces Lea to confront her own past.


I wasn't really expecting to love The Thirteenth Tale. The story didn't sound all that interesting, I don't love ghost stories, and the author looks kind of like Winona Ryder's freaky mom in Beetlejuice. But when I picked it up at the librarian whispered, "I'm not supposed to give people my opinion, but this book is soooo good." And once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. If you read one book this summer, make it this one.


--originally published 6/11/07

Book #24: Ella Enchanted

Title: Ella Enchanted


Author: Gail Carson Levine


I'll spare you the plot summary, since I'm pretty sure that practically everyone who would read this blog already knows that Ella Enchanted is an expanded, fleshed-out version of Cinderella. And a good one at that. We read it this month for our book club (and I started reading it to Annie, who loves it) and also had a good discussion of Cinderella stories, the princess phenomenon and modern heroines in historical novels. And I came home with something new to read (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister) which is always a good thing.


--originally published 6/11/07

Book #23: The Emperor's Children

Title: The Emperor's Children


Author: Claire Messud


In The Emperor's Children, Marina Thwaite is a 30ish Brown alum, daughter of a famous writer, who has been trying to "find herself" for most of the last decade. She and her two best friends, Danielle (a documentary filmmaker) and Julian (a freelance writer and critic), find themselves ten years out of college, and still not settled or really defined, living in New York City. The three spend a year involving themselves in three different kind of toxic romantic relationships. Marina's father, Murray Thwaite (the "emperor" of the story) and her cousin, Bootie Tubb, also play pivotal roles. And I've been wondering if Neil LaBute or Claire Messud got ahold of one another's works or if the similarity in theme between them is purely accidental (I won't say any more, just in case you plan to read this).


I thought the novel was very well written. Messud does a great job of creating real, flawed characters. But, like The Mercy Seat, I had a hard time identifying with the characters and the choices they made. Still, the novel does bring up the issue of truth and illusion and whether or not the price of honesty is always worth it.


--originally published 6/11/07

Book #22: The Mercy Seat

Title The Mercy Seat


Author: Neil LaBute


Another LaBute play about an ethical lapse. In The Mercy Seat, the main character, who was supposed to be in the World Trade Center on 9/11 but was instead with his mistress, is in the process of deciding whether to return to his family or play dead and escape with the mistress.


As I read The Mercy Seat, I felt pretty similar to how I did when I watched In the Company of Men-- a total lack of sympathy or understanding. Maybe it's the essential female-ness of me, but I really can't see how a seemingly normal sort of guy would allow his wife and kids to think he was dead rather than admit to them that he wants to be with his mistress. And maybe he doesn't want to be with the mistress either. I guess it's just that most 35 or 40 year-old guys at least sort of know what they want from life, or at least I expect them to.


--originally published 6/11/07

Book #21: Bash

Title: Bash: Latterday Plays


Author: Neil LaBute


I've watched several of Neil LaBute's movies (Nurse Betty, Possession and In the Company of Men) and I've avidly followed his career as a member of the LDS church whose work appeals to a mainstream audience. Bash, one of his most recent works, is a play in three acts (sort of three separate mini-plays) in which the main character commits an unspeakable crime. In two of the three plays, the character is LDS.


Ok, so if you're planning to read or watch the plays and you don't want me to ruin it for you, don't read any further....


I read a lot. And I think I'm pretty jaded as a result. Well, maybe not jaded, but not easily surprised or terrorized by what I read. But LaBute's first play, "Iphegenia in Orem" left me sobbing and I couldn't get the story out of my mind for days. I still get sort of creeped out thinking about it and it's been a couple of weeks since I read it. In the play, the speaker is a businessman from Utah who has invited a woman into his room while on a business trip. Instead of seducing her, he tells her a story about how he and his wife lost a child a year earlier. The baby was five months and the wife left her in his care, sleeping on the bed in the master bedroom, while she ran out to the grocery store. He was feeling depressed, because a friend had just called to tell him he was losing his job. When he went in to check on the baby, he found that she had wedged her way into the bed and was going to suffocate. Instead of rescuing her, he realized that he wouldn't get laid off in the wake of a family tragedy, and instead pushed her a little bit deeper under the covers.


I have my own five-month-old, and every time I looked at her for a few days after reading the play, I couldn't believe that a parent could look at their child struggling and not save them. I guess he was feeling tortured a year later (especially since the friend was joking when he called to tell him about the layoff), but sometimes I think people deserve to feel tortured.


The other two plays deal with similar themes, but it was the first one that struck me so powerfully.


--originally published 6/11/07

Children are like trees...

I went on a long run this morning in my neighborhood. My iPod has been freaky lately, so I left it at home, and it was just me and my thoughts slogging through the oppressive heat. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the baby hunger that won't go away, and I had a Shrek-style "ogres are like onions" moment (I think the fact that all of my cultural references come from animated movies shows that I've been in the parenting trenches too long). Children are like trees.

Let me explain. The houses in my neighborhood are all about ten or eleven years old. I live in one of those subdivisions where two thousand of the same three or four houses are thrown up practically overnight. Some of the original residents, in an attempt to distinguish their houses to the point that they didn't accidentally walk into their neighbor's house, went a little crazy with the landscaping, deviating from the standard builder's one-or-two-live-oaks-out-front model.

I'm sure that the people, when they were planting the trees, thought, "These trees are so small and so cute, our yard can handle five or six or ten of them." And yes, when the trees were small and cute, I bet the yards with five or six or ten little-bitty trees looked better than the yards with a lone live oak. But more than a decade later, the trees are no longer small and cute. Our live oak is as tall as our house. And the houses with five or six or ten trees in the front yard look like the jungle that was cut down to build the subdivision has come back and reclaimed its territory. I thought I was going to lose an eye when I wasn't quite quick enough to get out of the way of some errant branches from one of the adolescent trees as I was running this morning.

The houses with one or two trees still, for the most part, look pretty good. Yeah, the trees are big and the yards are small, but it works. And a couple of the houses with lots of trees have owners who are intrepid enough to brave the humidity and keep the jungle at bay. But most of the yards with lots of trees look wild-- and the owners seem overwhelmed by the chaos that their yards have become.

So how does this relate to children, and more specifically, to our choice to close up the baby-making shop even though I'm hungry for another one? I think it's pretty obvious. Right now our four little trees are pretty easy to handle. They're cute and I can still (usually) whip them into shape by counting to three in a mean voice. But one day, they're going to turn into teenagers, and I won't be able to physically dominate them anymore. I'll probably be so tired and worn out from things like yesterday's visit to the children's museum (you haven't lived until you've run down the main gallery of the museum, junior high school groups all around, baby attached to the boob, chasing after a toddler with a load in his underpants), that I won't be playing my A-game anymore. I've already created enough of a jungle. I guess our yard doesn't need any new saplings.

Maybe I'll plant some annuals instead. Now, in the symbolic sense, I just have to figure out what those annuals are.

--originally published 6/9/07