The Ideal Burger of Memory

"Take hamburgers. Here, hamburguesas are really bad. It's known that Americans like hamburgers, so again, we're idiots. But they have no idea how delicious hamburgers can be. It's this ideal burger of memory we crave...not the disgusting burgers you get abroad."

This is a quote from the movie Barcelona which I saw years ago. I only vaguely remember the rest of the movie, but this quote about hamburgers stuck in my mind, and struck me as appropriate for this post idea. Except when I typed it out and really thought about it, it wasn't really appropriate at all. But I liked it as a title so much that I decided I didn't give a rip.

What this post was actually supposed to be about was not an ideal hamburger of memory, but a mythic hamburger of imagination. But for me the hamburger is a book. (Bear in mind I'm still slightly feverish). I was wondering if I'd started ordering books in my sleep. Every few weeks, a book shows up in the mail, often from an obscure town in the U.S. or U.K. Sometimes I recognize the title, sometimes I don't. But I know it's some book that I've read a review of and wanted to read, and the library didn't have it, but one of the booksellers on abebooks.com did.

For the most part, the books cost under two dollars. The shipping costs are higher than the cost of the actual book. The entire transaction rarely exceeds ten dollars. But still. I go to the library every week because I'm trying NOT to spend any more money on books, and, almost more importantly, we have no more ROOM for books. The only reason I'm spending that ten dollars, and bringing another centimetre-and-a-half-width shelf-taker-upper into the house is because, once I realize the library doesn't have it, it becomes infinitely more desirable than the thousands of books the library has. Because what if it's The One? The mythical book of possibility that will change my life, unlock the doors of perception, shatter the sacred truths, and put an end to cellulite forever?

Of course, it's all usually a huge disappointment. The package arrives, and... it's just another book. Sometimes it's enjoyable enough, sometimes it's quite dreadful and you have to wonder what the hell the reviewer was thinking. Sometimes it's quite magical, most often when it involves science fiction/fantasy short stories by women, now that I think of it. I put these ones in my triple pile of books on my bedside table and read them one at a time, trying very hard to stop myself, when I reach the end of one, from rushing on to the beginning of the next (if I have to turn the page over for the next one it's easier to stop, otherwise it's a pathetic display of me trying to wrest the book out of my own hands). They are wise and splendid and occasionally they blow my doors of perception right off the hinges.

It's not that strange a phenomenon. It's always easier to imagine that the book you can't read is better than the one you have, or the one episode of Lost that you missed was the Best One Ever, or the thing you didn't order off the menu would have been ten times better than what you chose. And sometimes it's just incredibly fun and giddy-making to realize that I am a grownup with my own money (well, my husband's own money -- I'm workin' on it) and I can go ahead and order a book if I want to -- I actually do remember being incredibly frustrated as a child when I wanted a book and couldn't get my hands on it fast enough. On the other hand, I'm a grown-up and I should realize that I don't need to have every book I read about. At least not before I get to the bottom of my tripartite bedside table pile.

If you want to read the story that made me NEED the Ellen Klages book, (it's about a library!), the absolutely freaking amazing author allows that here. Of course, it makes me despair of ever writing anything one-fiftieth as good. But the Ideal Burger of Memory can't help it if it wrecks you for McDonald's.

Wordless Wednesdays (have gone monochromatic)

She says she's a superhero (we call her Super Orange Laryngitis Girl) but she also does interpretive dance. With her orange silly putty which was a prize from the MS Read-a-thon, which necessitates all clothing and accessories henceforth being orange. Plus the wall, which I painted to order as soon as she got home from school.

Feverish random thoughts

It would be somewhat inaccurate to say that today doesn't suck. Angus went back to school, still hacking up a lung periodically, but declaring that he feels fine. Eve has been an unhappy, warm-ish, snotty little heap on the couch all day (except when I asked her if she wanted me to put in Planet 51 or Fantastic Mr. Fox for her, and she stuck her head up and declared "Avatar!") and my throat feels like someone has flaming-arrowed a proclamation of doom to it. On the upside, I did manage to narrowly avoid spraying a bunch of Fantastik with Bleach into my load of darks, after I grabbed it thinking it was Spray Shout.

You know those laundry labels that say 'remove promptly from dryer?' Don't they just make you laugh with quiet indulgent affection? Oh yes, you dear little sweater/skirt/delicate lacy slip, I leave everything else crumpled and forlorn in the dryer all night or all day or all the whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it because I tend to throw laundry in right before I go to bed and then not think of it again until everyone's out of underwear and the pile of dirty clothes in the hall starts to heave itself around in search of water and soap, but YOU I will remember to fetch freshly heated and wrinkle-free the minute, nay, the very SECOND that indescribably annoying buzzer blats. Trust me.

You know what I hate? People who 'work tirelessly' at things. Especially because they're mostly noble, philanthropic, admirable things, which is a metric f*ckton of annoying, isn't it? Nobody really 'works tirelessly' at serving people sullenly at a drive-thru, or developing an untoward fondness for prescription painkillers, or letting their laundry sit in the dryer for three days until it looks like this only less cute. No, they're working tirelessly at curing porphyria, or repairing homes for senile talk-show hosts, or draping the naked in fresh and unwrinkled clothing (yeah, I know, it's getting old). I only ever work tirefully. Just thinking of working at things makes me tired. Just thinking of those people working tirelessly makes me unspeakably tired.

Angus just gave Eve a hug and she turned her head so she wouldn't cough directly into his face. Isn't that sweet?

So the Tylenol kicked in a couple of hours ago and Eve is now singing and trying to break her record for continuous ball bounces without fumbling. My Tylenol has not yet kicked in, and I sort of hate Eve right now. My mother said I should still keep her home tomorrow. My mother has clearly forgotten that kids can be sporting all the symptoms of cholera one second and dancing on your head and juggling kiwi fruit the next.

Pam and I usually walk on Wednesday mornings. If I was a working tirelessly sort of person, I would drag my diseased, phlegmy, migrainey ass out of bed in the morning. But we've covered that already. We've started walking on this really nice trail, where we run into a lot of people walking dogs, many off-leash, which isn't technically allowed, but they've all been remarkably well behaved. Can't say the same for that woman who blatantly let her dog take an unscooped poop in blatant view of our approaching selves. So we fixed our implacable gazes on her, bore down on her like a couple of avenging angels and VERY sternly WISHED HER A GOOD MORNING in a slightly less friendly tone than we customarily employ. Why? Well, obviously because Pam and I are a couple of GUTLESS PUSSIES!

I'm finding myself a little creepy at the moment, so I'm going to pop a few more pills and put my plague-ridden self to bed. Working tirelessly in the pursuit of mediocrity. That's how I roll.

So Wholesome It'll Make You Hurl

It was a beautiful day today. And we had no plans. This, naturally, sent me into a complete panic. Our general pattern for week-ends all year has been Matt and Angus out at hockey Saturday and Sunday, then showing up tired and napping or watching a James Bond movie, while I do course work or read or clean and Eve colours or plays with the girl from next door.

For some reason, my impulse with a day like this is always to try to get together with someone else. The kids like to have other kids to play with, and whenever there's more than two adults I have this hope that margaritas will magically appear. But who the hell is going to be around at short notice on a beautiful Saturday? I made two or three calls (nobody home at the first place, nobody I liked at the second house (kidding, it was the husband), sick at the third house). I faced the fact that we were going to have to do something as a family -- alone.

I informed the kids that we were going for a walk at the Chapman Conservation Area. They weren't overly impressed. I said if they did this for me, nicely, then we'd go to the park afterwards and Angus could play baseball and Eve could swing. And we could ride there in our new van. And I would refrain from calling them ungrateful wretched ingrates for the rest of the day.

Angus loves being outside as soon as the weather turns nice -- preferably with some kind of ball involved. Eve can go either way. In truth, she loves fruit, vegetables, and playing outside. But she's a little shit-disturber, so for my Mom she delights in saying "I love salt!" and for my Dad she trots out "I HATE the smell of fresh air". We sweetened the deal today by giving her Angus's old sunglasses, which she declared made her look crazy cool.

Eve being crazy cool:

As soon as we got there, it was nothing but good omens:

We were walking on a boardwalk set directly on the grass and Eve wanted to know why there was a 'bridge but no water'. Matt said it was because it probably got swampy, and they wanted to protect the vegetation. Eve said (happily), 'oh, so this is a nature place?'. I said yes. Then she grabbed my arm and said:

'BUT I'M AFRAID OF NATURE PLACES!'

She did, however, like the bulrushes.

Eve with her cotton candy bulrush (it was broken already):

Angus: 'Eve, come look at the swan'. Matt: 'It's not a swan, it's a duck. The ones with the green heads are called mallards'. Ten minutes later -- Angus: 'Look, there's another swan'. Matt: 'It's NOT a SWAN'. Angus: 'I know. I'm just saying that to annoy you'.

Then the walk came to a rather abrupt end, unless we were planning on going for a swim (Eve: "I am!")

On the way back we saw a bird. If we were good parents determined to give our kids a thorough natural education, we would have looked at our bird book when we got home and figured out what kind of bird it was. But we're us, so we forgot and now if I go looking for the bird book I'm just going to wake everyone up. Here's a picture of a bird in a tree:

Oops:

Oops again:

You don't even want to know how many tries this took:

On the way back to the van we saw a guy swinging a kayak up onto his head. Eve said "Is that a kayak?". I said "That's Mr. Canoehead". Eve said "that's a canoe?". I said "no, it's a kayak, but there's no Mr. Kayakhead". Matt said, with a considerable degree of scorn and impatience, that it was called portaging. Eve said "is that French for carrying on head?"

I was almost at the van, and I yelled back at the kids "thanks for coming on the walk you typically ungrateful wretched little ingrates". Angus laughed, and Eve said "What about ME?". I said "I was talking to both of you wretched little ingrates", and she said "oh, good. I didn't hear that."

We went to the park and swung and played baseball (I got nailed in the boob by a wild pitch. Ouch.)  Then we went home and did yard work, then we barbecued chicken and watched Fantastic Mr. Fox (brilliance, sheer brilliance). Then we played an uproarious game of Yahtzee (no Yahtzees tonight, but a freakish number of full houses). It was fun. My family doesn't suck. About tomorrow, though -- anyone wanna do something?

Good thing they weren't testing my emotional stability

I wrote my first exam in seventeen years last night, for my first library tech course. I wasn't stressed about the exam itself -- the instructor had assured us that the purpose of the exam wasn't to trick us, it was just to assure that we had met the learning goals of the course, and I knew that I had. Compared to the multiple-page essay questions on magical realism and narrative lyricism in One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was pretty sure this would be a breeze, and it was pretty close. But the actual mechanics of finding the right building and the right room and my exam actually being there and not tripping and losing all of my pens down a storm drain on the way... that I was nervous about. I drove to Algonquin the day before and scoped out the building lay-out -- people I knew were divided into two more or less equal groups on thinking this was a logical and prudent step and thinking it was thoroughly anal and laughable. Don't feel obliged to tell me which camp you fall into.

The night before I didn't sleep well. I read a little too late, thinking it would make me sleepy, then couldn't fall asleep. I got up early and walked with Pam anyway, thinking I could rest before the exam which wasn't until 6:30. I got home from the walk and grocery shopping at about eleven. The kids were slated to go to my Mom's from school and have dinner there, which seemed like a good plan when we made it, but the day just kind of stretched into this uncomfortable amorphous blob of hours to kill, and I couldn't really settle to anything. I read the paper. I cleaned up a little. I made some spicy black beans. I studied a little. I walked around flapping my hands a little, because Angus does it and I wanted to see if it actually worked as a tension reducer. It does a little. I left a little too early, which turned out okay, because when you get to the room you have to line up and wait for some woman to fish your exam out of a big box of exams.

The guy sitting at the table in front of me got in trouble for opening his exam early. Then he had a long question for the invigilator about something in his exam. I worried that he was going to be a troublemaker and wondered if I should move. Actually he was completely silent for the rest of the exam, but after a few minutes I realized that between questions I was flicking my pen between two fingers making an annoying tapping noise. I mentally apologized to the guy in front of me and made myself put the pen down between questions.

Turns out I can't write more than two lines without messing up words and writing crazy crooked sentences at this point. I raced through the easy stuff, then flipped back through and finished the stuff that required a bit more thought, then flipped through about ten times more than necessary to make sure I hadn't accidentally missed five pages of questions or anything (it could happen). For the life of me I couldn't formulate a coherent definiton of index, which was stupid but I only had to pick ten so it didn't matter, except that I totally knew it and it made me crazy.

I finished in about an hour and a half out of a possible three hours, handed in the exam and then spent the next ten to fifteen minutes wandering around the parking lot trying to find my car. It was like I popped some weird emotional cork the minute the exam was done. I used to be a cry-at-the-drop-of-a-hat person. Weddings, funerals, auto shows, commercials with kittens in them, I was your girl for copious waterworks. My Mom used to get mad at me for crying all the time, which, hello, like it's a voluntary function. When Angus was a baby I cried a lot too. But in the last few years I could count on one hand the times I've cried -- not sure if I used up my lifetime allottment or became suddenly insensitive or what. As soon as I was back in the car, I felt weirdly weepy. I was happy. I was fully one-twenty-fourth closer to a credential that could allow me to spend all day in a library AND GET PAID for it. I was happy. And tired. Really, really tired. I felt like I might fall asleep while driving. I stopped at an intersection, and four teenagers were crossing the road with the tiniest dachsund I've ever seen, and it's stumpy little legs were moving so fast they were basically a hummingbird-wing-like blur. I laughed so hard I could hardly start driving again. I decided to go to Chapters because the kids were still at my Mom's and my husband was hashing out baseball teams somewhere and I didn't feel like going home to an empty house. When I walked in they were playing Constant Craving by k.d. lang, and I was convinced it was the most beautiful song I'd ever heard and it almost made me cry again.

I bought this book and this book, because I'm trying to fill in some gap in my coverage of the classics, and it has to be better than this book, which I'm finally almost through, thanks be to all that is good and holy and not about whales. I went home and the kids were just going to bed. They were telling me stuff and I suddenly saw that Angus had a big fat lip, and he said he fell off his bike riding from school to my Mom's, but he was fine, it didn't hurt at all. So naturally I burst into tears. He kept saying he was fine, and I kept thinking how brave he was being, and realizing he was riding with his friend Jon, so even though it must have really hurt he wouldn't have felt like he could show it, which made me cry harder, whereupon my entire family declared me mad as a box of frogs and told me to go have a drink or something.

I ate some salmon, because I hadn't eaten before leaving for my exam, even though I'd meant to, but I'd gone up to fold laundry and happened on an old episode of this show, which I didn't even really watch when it was actually on, and Felix borrowed a gun to go deer-hunting and the family dog got shot, and I couldn't tear myself away until I found out if he was going to pull through, so I ran out of time to eat. I do realized this has blown my neat little theory that I only went loony AFTER the exam, but I strive for honesty here.

I went to bed and started reading this book, which is possibly the most beautiful and original ghost story with a wonderful sense of wholeness and rightness, or just an okay book that I read in a heightened state of appreciation. Then I finished reading it, because it was impossible not to. Then I laid down and cried some more. I felt fine, just like I'd sprung a slow leak from the eyes. It was annoying because my pillow kept getting wet.

I'm back to normal today. Mostly. Here's hoping this is a one-time thing, since I'm looking at roughly twenty more of these over the next four years, and it would be nice if I don't have to go home from my library job to a padded room.

The Frog Girl ready for the birthday party at Little Ray's Reptiles

Knowing Me Knowing You April

I'm playing knowing me knowing you with Shan because hey, free blog post idea (this reminds me of a Jack Handey saying).

1. Do you have a library card?

Yes yes yes oh my loving god a world of yes. If I didn't I would have to sell my body and my children and all my worldly possessions to support my book habit (yeah, selling my body might only get me four pages of a Chicken Soup for the Sociopath's Soul, but my kids are cute). I put books on hold and promise myself I will ONLY check out the books on the hold shelf, and then books leap out at me from the shelves on my way to the check-out computer and the stack of books on my bedside table grows ever taller and shakier. There was this thing for awhile where the library stairs were trying to kill me, but they fixed them. My kids love the library too, but not as much as I do, and honestly they just kind of slow me down so I only take them with me every third or fourth time.

2. To carry on with the theme, would you purchase a digital reader like a kindle?

Originally I thought no way in hell and why does everybody keep feeling the need to try to replace my beautiful beautiful books? But I've seen one and it's much more reader-friendly than I expected it would be. I guess it's more practical for portability and god knows I have waaaaaay too many bookshelves taking up space in my house. So I'd never say never, but one would pretty much have to fall in my lap attached to chocolate, and I'm still not giving up my matte-covered trade paperbacks.

3. Which night of the week is fright night (aka your busiest night of the week)?

We actually haven't really had one this year so far. Eve has Irish Dance Monday evening, they both have piano on Tuesday and the rest of the weeknights are free, and then hockey on the week-ends. Eve has gone as far as she can in swimming without jumping in so we're taking a break from that. We are, however, about to enter spring baseball season, with one kid in rookie and one in minor, which means four games a week, often on four different nights, which turns us into two single parents living in the same house, high-fiving each other while running in and out from various baseball games, and trying to fit in a few minutes of homework here and there. And making sure the equipment doesn't get mixed up because Angus doesn't take too well to ending up with Eve's pink batting helmet.

4. Watching Idol? Who are you picking to win?

Idol? You mean that nefarious show that kept Glee from me for three months? Not if you tied me down and toothpicked my eyelids open.

5. Do you have a clothesline?

No, and I miss it. In my parents' old house we had a mile-long clothesline that went from the deck high across the yard to a telephone pole. I absolutely loved pegging clothes out and sending them sailing across the back yard. Now I have a tiny Barrhaven backyard. I dry most things on a rack in the basement. I suppose we could get a rack for the backyard, but it's just not the same.