Hi, my name is Allison, and I love Twilight

Oh, the burning shame and humiliation. I'd rather confess to pinching babies or tipping pregnant women. Everybody I knew was doing it, but I was so smug, so sure that I was immune. I didn't make fun of them (everybody has their weaknesses) but I felt quietly superior. Come on... a girl and a vampire? And there was a werewolf? What else... she gets into a four-way with the vampire, the wolf and a mime? (hey, mimes are scary).

I have mentioned that I do like my junk-food lit. I like mysteries. I like science fiction and fantasy and sometimes horror. But I'm generally impervious to romances. Even if a mystery looks good, if the jacket copy mentions some ruggedly handsome detective solving the crime while fighting a dangerous attraction to the beautiful but wounded sister of the deceased, I'm out. I know there are only supposed to be seven stories and all the books in the world are only variations on those themes, but it seems to me that romances have an even more limited template than any other genre -- it's just hard to find variations interesting enough to hold my attention. I believe people when they say good ones are out there, I'll even read one if someone puts it in my hands with a strong recommendation, but I don't seek them out.

So what the hell was I doing in the checkout lane at Costco with that slick black cover smirking up at me from my basket? Beats the crap out of me. My husband was away, my kids were at birthday parties, I was sleep-deprived enough to have thought that killing two hours in Costco ON A SUNDAY was any kind of an idea... clearly my immunity was low. I was supposed to be shopping for something for dinner and what I ended up with was a teen romance, six bottles of body lotion and eighteen blueberry muffins (what the hell, I could always send Eve out hunting and foraging again, right?)

It was like sinking into a narcotic fog. I tried to pull away from it, but it was like quicksand. I've tried to figure it out, but I can't. I think maybe they've figured out a way to embed microscopic subliminal messages under the words. Because it's not like you can in any way articulate what's so freaking compelling about it. When you break the plot down, it sounds idiotic (go ahead, try it). So why is it like chocolate-covered crack?

At least it's not just me this time. I do have the occasional inexplicable lapse where something that would normally pass almost unnoticed gains a stranglehold on my psyche for some reason. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Buffy had to kill Angel? That laid me out for weeks (and now that I've told you that, I have to kill you). When I was pregnant with Angus, I was reading this fluffy mystery series about a female Egyptologist who excavated pyramids etc. with her hunky archaeologist husband and her son in the early nineteen hundreds. They adopted some orphaned girl, and as their son and adopted daughter grows up, you can see a romance developing between them. The author kept dragging it out so you'd think for sure THIS book couldn't end without them declaring their love, or kissing, or shaking hands or something and Jesus Christ, another book would end with agonizing repression and noble renunciations and aneurysm-inducing misunderstandings. And who gives a crap, but I was pregnant and hormonal and this author was at least in her sixties and I was seriously on the verge of writing her a letter saying look, lady, if you die before you get these people alone in a tent in the Biblical sense, I will be seriously vexed. I felt like I couldn't go on with my life until this got resolved.

I wonder if it's like that thing when pregnant women started eating raw potatoes and mustard or yak hair or whatever, because they're lacking some vitamin or enzyme that they don't know about. When I was pregnant with Eve I had an overwhelming desire to abuse inhalants. Also, we were refinishing the basement and I could barely restrain myself from licking the drywall dust (I know, I know). I found out later that this was indicative of severe anemia -- unfortunately I was afraid my midwife would lock me up if I confessed, so I was gazing longingly at my baby powder for way longer than was necessary (once at Kelsey's the waitress asked if I wanted my wings 'dusted' and I almost kissed her).

I think I might really be onto something here. There must be some periodic momentary deficiency in my psychological make-up that makes me occasionally susceptible to sappy, overwrought romances. I don't think it's actually lack of romance -- I never actually want to be the character, and if I actually want romance it's not hard to get it (or a reasonable facsimile); plus, the drywall dust wasn't actually going to raise my iron levels (I don't think). Maybe I can get some kind of syndrome named after me -- maybe there's a vaccine!

So there you go. It's not my fault. I feel so much better.

Besides, I'm sure I can quit any time.

The Life-Sucking Inferiority Complex Always Rings Twice

Correct me if I'm wrong, but for most people, an appointment with an appliance repairman is a mild pain in the ass, not a life-rearranging event, right?

I suspect that I'm really quite ill.

I always pray that they'll show up the first five minutes in that four-hour window because otherwise it's four hours of feeling like I'm about to be photographed and interviewed for Freaks and Losers Magazine. What's he going to think of my hair? Is he going to think I'm fat? I have to vacuum and dust the laundry room plus everything in the path from the door to the laundry room. I have to make sure Eve isn't watching television because I don't want him to think I'm one of those mothers who lets her kids watch television during the day (I totally am one of those mothers). I have to look busy while he's here, like I'm cleaning or teaching my kid Chinese or brokering some kind of major real estate transaction.

Don't most people just let the guy in and go about their business? Am I descending to the point where I'm going to be stopping homeless people on the street and asking them if they think I'm a bad person? (no offense to homeless people -- I've met several who are more self-confident and less whiny than I am). Where does this insatiable and deranged need for external validation come from? Why can't I just accept that I do some things quite well (squash soup), I do a lot of things really badly (volleyball, public speaking, sleeping and waking up and hey, not like THAT takes up half your life), and not everybody I meet is going to like me and THAT'S OKAY (ha ha, do some people really convince themselves of that crap?)

The dryer's fixed. The guy reeked of smoke. He seemed to like me okay, though. I mean, he didn't say anything, but I'm pretty sure we exchanged a glance that was neutral verging on amicable.

When we're home or out anywhere together, Eve stops what she's doing every twenty minutes or so to come and hug me and say 'I love you Mama' and waits until I say it back, which I do, gladly. But I also sort of think 'oh sweetie, don't be emotionally needy like your mother, it makes life and relationships and basic home maintenance so exhausting'. Let's not even talk about what happens when I need to get the piano tuned.

Night everyone. Love you all. If you don't love me back, no problem (but you do, right?)

Yeah, childhood bites, what else is new?

What kind of swimsuit do you wear to wallow in the self-pity pool?
Who was that silly optimistic woman who blathered on about her and the kids being a quiet, contained island of mutual adoration and contentment? We're sinking into a slum of despair. There are footprints on the wall, the powder room smells like pee and I have a creeping rash on my torso (overshare? -- sorry). Today Eve told me the soap in the powder room was empty and she had to change it, in much the same tone she might use to tell me there was no food in the house and she had to go out and slaughter a moose for dinner. Angus and I tried to practice his book talk for tomorrow and I made him cry. How much do I suck? Let me count the ways. To top it off, now I'm watching the end of House before I put the kids to bed when it's already ten minutes past their bedtime -- I'm a monster. I will now give a bitchy, mean-spirited book review to match my mood. A person I dislike quite strongly recommended this book to me (five years ago -- I didn't read it on his recommendation). I wonder if that has anything to do with me not liking it. Or maybe it's all the filth and premenstrual hormones.
Childhood
by Andre Alexis
To put it as succinctly as possible, I thought the writing in this book was great, the characters were unlikeable, and the story was annoying. Tom is dumped on his cantankerous, volatile grandmother as a baby, experiences a loveless childhood until her death, when his mother Katarina returns to reclaim him. He then experiences a confusing adolescence with his mother and Henry Wing, a gentle and peculiar man who adores his mother and gives Tom free reign in his large library and laboratory. Tom now lives a peculiar adulthood in Henry's house, following a strict regimen of sleeping, waking, eating, reading and writing. He mentions a "you" whom he allegedly loves, to whom he is telling the story of his life.
I find the process of memory interesting. How we remember and mis-remember, different people having conflicting accounts of the same event, this kind of thing is interesting. It seemed to me that for every period of his life, Tom would say "I don't remember much of these years" or "I remember so little of this period it might as well have been lived for me". This is not interesting. This is obvious and unnecessary to say. Perhaps the lack of affection shown to him in his formative years by his strange and demanding grandmother explains his detached, rather cold view of others. Certainly it's not surprising that he would be ambivalent towards his mother, but he doesn't give the reader enough to form an independent opinion. I found his attitude towards Henry, the man who never treated him with anything but tenderness and respect, annoying also. It's not uncommon for children to view permissive adults with a certain contempt, but later when Henry is older and infirm and asks for his help he doesn't show any more affection. The narrator may be troubled, but he comes across largely as a cold fish, and while that may have been the point, it left me cold as well.

Do you want attitude with that?

I do not love mankind.

That's the first line of a book I really like (The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken). I've always thought of myself as a nice person -- to my family and friends, but also to humanity at large. I let other drivers in front of me, I try not to block the aisle with my grocery cart, I pick things up when pregnant women drop them. I like to be helpful, for its own sake as well as for the "oh, you're so sweet" element, which I do also enjoy. I try not to be overly judgemental. I look for the best in people.

Until they piss me off.

A few years back I realized something sort of unpleasant about myself. I was working at Chapters (no, that's not it, although it was very unpleasant at times). We had just moved to Ottawa and I had just left a job in audio publishing where I was advancing quite quickly due to the fact that the boss was crazy and threw books at people and employees kept objecting to this and leaving. As attractive as this situation must sound, I got married and moved to Ottawa with my husband (which is probably just as well because I realized right before I left that I had approved the wrong label copy for a Jimi Hendrix rockumentary and God knows what they would have done to me). And got a job at Chapters, for my sins. Before the crazy audio publisher I had worked in a charming little independent bookstore in Toronto, but none of the independents were hiring here, and I needed something I could take the bus to, and there were BOOKS there, how bad could it be?

It was quite bad.

At the interview, I said they should hire me because books were my life and I understood the importance of customer service. If someone has three or four errands to run in a day, I said beamingly, whether they get good service or bad service at those three or four places sets the tone for their entire day. Good customer service makes the sun shine and puppies frolic and makes the world go around. Also, I had this newspaper article from when some guy from the Quill & Quire did a secret shopper thing at area bookstores and said I was the best bookseller he met and I was knowledgeable and nice and helpful (see?), and everyone at my store knew it was me but he never asked my name (story of my life). So they hired me, either because of these reasons or because I had a pulse and I looked like they could get a few good months out of me before they squeezed me totally dry and lifeless.

I was in the children's section, so there were fun parts. I did story time, my displays were the most fun, I had unlimited access to Dr. Seuss. And most of the kids were great. The parents, on the other hand.... I know working retail can really suck. I've often wondered why, if someone is having a crappy day, they think, "I know! I'll go make the frozen yogurt girl's life hell! That will really perk me up!". But there's something especially wrong about people being bitchy and mean in a bookstore -- as far as I'm concerned, it's sort of like swearing in church. So when someone came in, I was ready with a smile, and if they were nice they were served like they'd never been served before, because I hadn't had kids yet, I was still smart and I knew a LOT about books. But if they came at me with a "there MUST be a book about left-handed bald men who like boats", or a "well no, she doesn't like the first six books you picked for her, find another one", or a "I will now hold you personally responsible for the fact that the newspapers are a mess and you don't have enough French books", then that was it. Oh, I would still help them, but unenthusiastically, and I held the best book recommendations back, because they clearly didn't deserve them. If I was on cash, I punched in the prices in a very snippy manner.

Okay, this sounds really stupid now that I've set it all out -- big surprise, I'm nice to people who are nice. But really, that's the easy part, right? My friend J. tells a fantastic story about her father-in-law, who went out for a walk around the neighbourhood on New Year's Day and said "Happy New Year" to everyone he met. If someone didn't answer, as he passed them he said "well, go to Hell then!". It's a good story, but it's not really the life philosophy I'm striving for. So I'm trying to be more forgiving (even though people who don't smile back when you put yourself out there and smile at them are, in my book, the meanest people in the world -- unless they've just been diagnosed with cancer or found out their wife is cheating on them or something -- sometimes I forget to allow for that).

More than anything, those people who park their grocery cart in the middle of the aisle and take five minutes browsing the soup, or the ones who cut in front of you in line, or the ones who talk during the movie just confuse me. Do they genuinely enjoy pissing other people off? Are they even more self-absorbed than I am? (that hardly seems possible). Are they just really not very bright? Regardless, I'm working on rising above it all. I will be nice to the un-nice masses. I will dispense kindness to the undeserving.

Hard not to adore me, isn't it?

I'm SURE that border is irregular!

My mother just forwarded me this email about some woman who drank out of a can of pop without washing it and had a seizure or something and died and it turned out the can had dried rat urine on it, which begs the question.... has my mother freakin' MET me? My husband is AWOL (well, with begrudging leave), it's minus a million out, it's like mounting the goddamned Franklin expedition getting Angus to hockey in the morning, and she wants me to spend the few hours I have to sleep washing cans and obsessing about rat urine. Thanks, Mom. Did I mention that one of the manifestations of my anxiety is massive hypochondria? Every few months I'm absolutely for sure this time dying of something. It sounds funny, which it kind of is, except for that part of the experience where I really believe it. The internet is not a thing the stay-at-home hypochondriac should be allowed access to. Pretty much across the board, you look something up and the symptoms include joint pain, fatigue and having a nose -- I have them all. Except tongue cancer. I heard about tongue cancer and a couple of weeks later I had a weird spot on my tongue and I looked it up and there was no way in the world it could have been tongue cancer.

That was a good day.

I think the point people miss about hypochondriacs is that they're not just pretending to be sick -- they really think they are sick. My sister (the brilliant pharmacist) told us a story about a doctor she met that dealt with psychosomatically ill people, and the approach was to give them something that would treat the illness if they had it or force them to admit that they didn't actually have it. So one woman said 'no, I believe you that it's all in my head, but I still feel it, so how does that help me?' Take that, smartass doctor.

It's strange how at the time it seems certain and rational, and looking back it seems so pocketful-of-crazy. I spent half of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat freaking out about a mole on my shoulder that suddenly seemed scaly and sinister. I couldn't wait to get out of there and go to the walk-in clinic on the way home (well, it was Joseph. I don't think the same thing would have happened at Miss Saigon). Breast self-exams are really just a disaster waiting to happen for me. Then there's MS, Parkinson's, ovarian cancer -- I'll be sitting in bed trying to read and my insides keep going cold thinking of the things that could be desperately wrong with me.

After countless repetitions of this really quite tedious cycle, I've started to recognize what's happening, which helps. A little. My sense of irony allows me to conclude that the likelihood that I will actually turn out to be dying one of these times when I think I'm dying is extremely low. It would totally shut my husband up, though (See? See? I told you I had prostate cancer!!!).

I've also realized that when I go to my doctor (a kind and very very patient woman) I'm not only looking for her to tell me I don't have cancer right now; what I really want is for her to say you're never going to get cancer.

I don't know where else to go from there without getting really cheesy and melodramatic (the real sickness is the fear that's eating up my life! I need to heal the fear!). So if you'll excuse me, after that exhausting moment of insight, I'm going to bed. Right after I google diabetic retinopathy.

Eve Being Funny at Lunch, and Hunger

Today at lunch (Broadway's Diner), Eve turned to me and announced definitively that she had learned what twins are called when they're not 'hi-dentical': 'eternal'. 

Hunger by Elise Blackwell

I have a weakness for small, beautiful, matte-papered hardback books. While I'm reading I'm often unconsciously smoothing my fingers over the cover papers. My husband sometimes asks if the book and I would like to be alone.

The prose is spare and somehow cold in this book. Reading it feels somehow akin to walking through the frigid, snow-dusted squares of a Russian city. It makes you feel cold and sad and hungry.
The unnamed narrator is a scientist who collects plants and seeds to be stored safely and kept for posterity at the Research Institute of Plant Industry in Leningrad. His wife and mistress both work at the Institute as well. The novel concerns the siege of Leningrad by German troops in 1941, when food becomes so scarce that people are reduced to unthinkable measures in order to stay alive.

The narrator does not present himself as a man beyond reproach, which makes the story chillingly realistic. He details ways in which he acted both with bravery and cowardice throughout the 'hunger winter' and admits without melodrama that he raided the stores of grains and rice which he was entrusted with protecting in order not to starve to death. The image of him chewing on hard rice kernels with his malnutrition-loosened teeth is viscerally distrubing. He also describes notice boards where people offer to trade work, heirlooms, bodies and souls for foods -- "The bravery to survive is a ruthless one. Martyrdom leads, by its very definition, only to the cold ground".
The story is full of potent images, such as the trees in the city stripped of bark for a dubious food source, so that they are naked and skeletal. There are heartening stories of "tremendous sacrifice and honour" but also many which demonstrate, as the narrator believes, that "deprivation debases more often than it ennobles".
This is a story that provokes thought on the essential issues of what makes us human, and how little hardship is needed to strip away the veneer of civilization and reduce us to our basest instincts. Reading it in a place where food is readily available and easily wasted was an uncomfortable but rewarding experience.

Will they fit under his face guard?

I'm feeling uninspired today so I'm just changing the colours and fonts and hoping that will enhance your reading experience to the point where you won't really notice the quality of the writing.
photo credit
Day two husbandless: the already-read newspapers are piling up, the kitchen garbage doesn't magically empty itself every morning any more, and Angus needs glasses. Okay, I probably can't blame that last one on Matt being off skiing in the French Alps. Took the kids to the eye doctor. Eve was very nervous and unhappy on the way there -- I couldn't seem to convince her that they were just going to look at her eyes, not stick needles in them or remove them or anything. Naturally once we got there she climbed up and sat in the chair like it was her personal throne and kept saying "my eyes are great, really, I just want to see what kind of things you have here" and giggling like a sorority girl on ecstasy. Angus was calm on the way there, but took the whole business much more seriously. The eye doctor was shining a light in his eye and saying, okay, just look at my left ear while I do this and Angus was like, "your ear? I can't see your ear, where's your ear? OH MY GOD I CAN'T SEE AN EAR!!!" Apparently he's a little farsighted on the left and a little nearsighted on the right. Unbalanced, like his mother. Poor guy -- he's inherited my crappy eyesight as well as my penchant for treating every single occurrence as if it's a major league disaster. 
At one point the doctor was flipping through a book of numbers in red and green patterns, and Angus got all the left pages and none of the right, and the doctor explained the test and said we should keep an eye on it for possible colour blindness issues, then turned to the computer. I saw Angus looking at me and I said it's nothing to worry about and he said "so I don't have some kind of eye disease?" and I had to explain he's probably just like his father, and he will need a wife to dress him every day to avoid social ostracization, but other than that he's fine. Although if you saw some of the things both of them try to wear together, you'd really be forgiven for wondering about that.
I'm reading a cool book of science fiction stories by women, paired with essays about feminism in science fiction, but I can't remember the title right now. A little light on the Biblio, I know. Hey, my husband's away and I have the season premiere of Lost on the PVR. Priorities, people.