Science Fair embarrassments

I have no clue why I just thought of this, other than the fact that I’m often involved in strange conversations at work.

I’ve participated in exactly one science fair.  I don’t remember what my subject was, though I’m certain I didn’t plan it well and whatever “experiment” I did was crap.  I’m not a science girl, never have been.

What I do remember, though, is my tri-fold board.  For whatever reason, my parents didn’t want to buy me the tri-fold board that every other kid in the known universe was instructed to use, so my father made me one. Out of plywood.  With metal hinges.

No, really.

You know how some kids are bratty and spoiled and if they don’t have what all the other kids have then they feel all mistreated and abused?

I felt that way, but I think I was completely justified.

This thing was tall, and heavy, and had sharp jagged edges on it and it was a bitch to carry and I wanted to just die in a fire rather than carry that damn thing into school.  It wasn’t sanded or painted or anything—just wood, with some sheets of paper tacked onto it.

So . . . that was the most random story ever.

UPDATE: In the 3rd grade I twisted my ankle. Instead of crutches or anything, Dad gave me a wooden cane. Let me tell you, 8-year-olds will MOCK a child hobbling around with a giant wooden cane.

I want out of this lease

That’s right, it’s time for apartment updates!

Ugh.  Where do I start? A few days ago we tried to run our dishwasher.  It made a horrible squealy noise before dumping water onto the floor.  Awesome.  Someone came out today and looked at it.  The water line has been chewed through.  By a mouse.  This would be the same mouse problem that we’ve been bitching about for 2 YEARS.  Seriously.

In fact, the mouse/mice have suddenly caused a HUGE problem.  In the entire building.  Out of 8 units, they’re replacing 3 dishwashers, 2 refrigerators, and a water line.  NOW they’re finally sending out an inspector.  Gosh.  Also, they still haven’t fixed the leak in the roof/attic that causes rain in our stairwell during every storm.

So yeah, I want out of this damn lease.  They don’t fix anything in a timely manner, if they manage to fix it at all, and our water bill has doubled (and according to a maintenance guy today, next month will be worse due to a water main bursting on the property last Saturday).  Anyone familiar with TX tenant rights?  Want to help me get out of this lease without buying it out?

And now I’m done

Okay, I finished the 4th Twilight book.

And while I stand by my last ranty post, I’ve decided that these books are not the most evil things ever.

Yes, I still think that the lessons and portrayals of female sexuality are just . . . wrong. Very wrong. But I also think that these books aren’t well-written enough to matter, in the end.  They’re simply not good enough to stick with anyone for a lifetime, which will hopefully negate the ass-backward themes in them.

Also, I read some objectively terrible-for-me literature as a pre-teen or younger (Flowers in the Attic, anyone?) and have not been scarred by it, so far as I can tell.

So I’m willing to admit that I was overreacting about the possible long-term effects of Twilight.

Anyway, let’s get to my review of the last book, since I haven’t really done a review of any of them that has anything like a plot summary. They’ve mostly been me shouting.  Here be spoilers:

This was the stupidest book of the bunch. Hard competition, I know, but really. There’s honeymoon sex which leaves Bella all bruised (and as AvB pointed out to me, she’s oddly proud of it). Mkay. I’m going to gloss over that.

She gets pregnant, there’s a mutant baby who, once born, grows at an astounding rate. Much like that blonde half-alien baby from V. You’re original, Meyer. Jacob the werewolf falls in love with the baby as soon as she’s born (no really, there’s this thing called imprinting and it’s just so stupid) and just like that, all his love and angst over Bella is over. Poof. So the Team Jacob freaks can calm it on down, because it’s never going to happen.

Another thing I mentioned to AvB, and I stand by it, is that all these books read like semi-literate fanfiction.  (For the non-dorky, fanfiction is when fans are not satisfied with where the books end and take it upon themselves to write new stories using the same characters. Or to make random characters have sex with each other in fairly inventive ways. It’s pretty funny). The point being, most fanfiction is a pale imitation of a real story. Characters aren’t that fleshed out because that part, the hard part, was taken care of in the original work by the author. That’s how Twilight seems.  The characters have little motivation for their actions other than “and that’s how it is” or “because these are the things I know.” But the process leading up to big decisions is rarely revealed.

So there. I did it. And now I can say with authority that Twilight kind of sucks. It’s not complete dreck, but it’s also not good enough to get all in a lather over. Even for me.

Further reaction to Twilight

Ok, I downloaded the third book.

I realized that, aside from wanting some trashy reading on my vacation, I needed to know what this whole thing was about. Yeah, I’ve been bitching from the sidelines and yammering on and on about how stupid this all is, but the truth is that I was echoing sentiments of others. And it seemed unfair for me to complain about something I hadn’t read a single line of.

I’m now halfway through the third book and I’ve gotta tell you . . . this stuff is disturbing.

Not because of the whole vampire-werewolf supernatural blah blah blah. And not because it’s fluff. But because of how it portrays female sexuality.

These books are about abstinence, first of all. Edward won’t sleep with Bella until they’re married. Which, hey, I’m not against abstinence. Girls, don’t sleep with people until you’re old enough to know what you’re doing and can give legal consent. I’m all for that. So you want to veil an abstinence lesson in these terms? Go ahead.

What bothers me most is that it’s providing a view of female sexuality as dangerous and abnormal. As something to be avoided at all costs.

Stick with me here.

Bella kisses Edward, and he constantly pulls away. Why? Because he might snap and kill her. And when she has a normal, hormonal reaction, such as, I don’t know, wanting to kiss him a little more or wanting to maybe get a little frisky, he chastises her. I’m completely serious. In this world, completely normal sexual urges put a girl in a position to die.  While Edward might be battling her temptation, Bella is working hard not to be a temptation in the first place by denying what she wants.

On the other hand, when she’s around Jacob (the werewolf) who she could ostensibly be sexual around, she has to avoid making him too angry or he could hurt her. Again, I’m completely serious. She’s even shown a consequence of this when she meets a woman, Emily, with scars across her face from the time she was too close to her own werewolf boyfriend and he changed, lashed out, and mauled her.

The lessons aren’t too hard to interpret: Don’t be tempting. Don’t have sexual urges. Don’t make these men angry. Dire results will follow.

And if physical death isn’t what befalls you, then emotional death will occur. Edward leaves Bella for her own good, and she shuts down for months. Meyers even sets up the chapters this way: Each chapter has the name of a month, followed by a blank page. Bella becomes a mindless zombie who can’t even sleep or breathe correctly without the object of her obsession present. This is what happens when you orient your entire life around one thing and that thing leaves. You are left as a shell of yourself and your life becomes as empty as those pages.

Lastly, we have the control issue. Edward doesn’t want Bella to see Jacob (there’s a whole vampire vs werewolf thing). And so when he leaves town for a weekend and realizes that Bella may get a little rebellious and sneak out to see Jacob, he bribes his sister to kidnap her and keep her hostage at a “slumber party” for two days. Again, I’m not even joking. And Bella is mad at this, yes she is! But not for long, because she loves Edward and realizes that he’s only trying to protect her the best he knows how. Mkay.

This is what all these young girls are reading, learning, and obsessing over. Yes, the writing is not great and that’s certainly a separate issue. It’s easy to get caught up in the drama of the books and the overwrought emotions and romance. I understand the appeal, especially to pre- and early-teen girls, because it’s all about angst and longing with little to no payoff.

But I find these books dangerous. They are presenting women in a light that I find offensive and insulting, but wrapping it up in terms of true love, soul mates, and the supernatural. You have to take a step back and look at what keeps happening in the stories. The lessons presented here smack of pre-feminist bullshit, couching everything in terms of how it might affect men.

Stephanie Meyers, I may have purchased your books, but I ain’t buying it.

**I’m perfectly aware that this very view has probably been written about and discussed somewhere like Jezebel. I’m going to go and read some of it now.

Twilight 1 and 2. Aka God help me, that was dumb.

Okay, here’s the thing and don’t bother making fun of me.

I wanted a brainless, trashy Sunday. I wanted to get a couple of ebooks. I got Twilight 1 and 2. I read them.
The writing is subpar. I mean really. And parts of it are, frankly, stupid. He sparkles, she trips, somehow she decides she’s in love with him after he “dazzles” her.  I wanted trashy, and boy did I find it. The descriptions are pointless, the characterizations are empty, and the plot is convoluted.

I can’t even be fussed to write an entire review of these because I read them both in 1 day and I felt a little nauseated afterwards, kind of like when I eat too much sugar or cheap Chinese food.

In fact, that’s not a bad metaphor. These books are empty calories—they don’t nourish you. Good books feed you, you gain something larger. These are just junk food. Fun for a road trip, say, but bad for you in larger doses.

But of course, here is my main complaint. Wrong words. Here is a sample sentence. Can you spot the error?
“…watching the dust moats stirring in the sunlight…”

MOATS? Really? ARGH. Pretty sure you mean “motes” there honey. Because dust MOATS are not only highly unlikely, but if you DID manage to create one, I hope they wouldn’t be stirring in the damn sunlight, know what I mean?

Now, I’m not sure if this was in the original book or if the epub people screwed it up. Because in the 2nd book, there were spacing errors. Everywhere. Words being smushed together and general proofing laziness. In fact, these spacing errors look like the things I’m paid to correct at work. And frankly, I don’t think I’m being picky when I say that if you expect people to pay for a product, it had better damn well be perfect (or at least stick to the admittedly low level set by the print version). But simple errors should not exist.

At this point, I really don’t know if I can take the other 2 books. We’ll see how I feel after I read some real writing.

Yeah, I’m complaining

So I got a temporary job at a digital media company. We get scanned pages of newspapers and magazines, capture the bits and label them appropriately, proof them, and they turn into epubs.  And I like the actual work, even though the pay is sad and my last paycheck hurt my feelings. But oh my God, it is run so badly.

First of all, this shift I worked tonight (on Thanksgiving) was so dumb, not even 3 hours. What a waste. Second, I watched a girl spend most of the 3 hours on FB and youtube, and when she DID deign to work, she did it wrong. I simply cannot fathom how a company can bleed money on such a bunch of fucking incompetents as they’ve hired. Because first they pay people to not work, and then when the stupids fuck it up, it takes time (and money) for other people to fix it. What a bunch of morons. If they fired the stupid people, they could pay the good ones a tiny bit more. IDIOTS!!!

AND, you know what? I was working from an error report last night and someone had typed in “insert haifin into line 3.” That’s how they spelled “hyphen.” If you can’t even spell a simple word, should you really be responsible for proofing something? I think not.

And the software is jacked up, the process is so wildly inefficient, it just boggles the mind. I can’t help it–when I’m told to proof something, I want it perfect. It’s how I am.

Tonight I kept getting a page in proofer that hadn’t been blocked, though it needed to be (into several articles). The first time I sent it back, I put a comment up saying it had to be blocked. The second time I got it, nothing had been changed. I sent it back again, with the same comment. The THIRD time, I ripped off my headphones and said “Okay guys, I’m sending back this page for the third time, could someone PLEASE block it?”

Inefficiency. I don’t understand how this company makes money or keeps clients. I should just start my own company, get someone like Casey to write me some programs, and steal all their clients. Because I’ve seen the final products and if I was a subscriber, I would ask for my damn money back. It’s laughable.

 

Laughing at the absurdity

I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard by Tom Reynolds

You know how in High Fidelity, the big motif was the top 5? Top breakups, movies, songs by theme, whatever.

Well, imagine if Nick Hornby took all the plot and characters out, but left the wit and the obsessive need to categorize and list things.

That’s what you have here. Reynolds has gathered and sifted through decades of music just so he can present them, complete with mocking commentary, to you. And who are you, mysterious reader, to enjoy such a thing?

Honestly, you’re probably a Pajiban or something close to it. There’s no getting around it. The style here is not unlike what made me a fan of Pajiba’s writing in the first place, albeit it with a bit less cursing and fewer sexual innuendos. But the snark is straight up stinging—Reynolds doesn’t hold back when it comes to pile-driving a deserving song right into the ground.

Seeing as “depressing” is kind of a catch-all adjective (hell, depending on the day I’ll find a cereal commercial as depressing as, say, worldwide famine), Reynolds breaks it down into categories by theme such as:

• I Was a Teenage Car Crash
• She Hates Me, I Hate Her
• Horrifying Remakes of Already Depressing Songs
• I Had No Idea That Song Was So Morbid
• Perfect Storms

Now, Perfect Storms really are something to behold. Described as “the audio equivalent of a Donner Party guide loudly insisting he knows the way through the pass,” they necessitate the use of at least two things:

• BCM (brain-concussion modulation): “When vocalists, anxious to show they can hit a high J, wait breathlessly while the orchestra slams the music into a higher key”
• Rasputin Effect: “Right when you think the song is over and dead, it comes back to torture you further”

And he’s not kidding, they are awful. But the entire book is hilarious and fun to read. I was laughing out loud at some of the low blows he takes at what is considered by far too many to be really deep and meaningful music. Smart, witty writing, and thank God because these songs really are downers.

The only, only thing missing for me was an accompanying CD. Some of the older songs just aren’t in my music collection and it was hard to read along if nothing about the song was sticking in my memory. To satisfy my own craving, and to encourage some of you to read the book, I’m providing a handy dandy playlist with most of the songs.

I don’t consider this to be a spoiler—any fool can see the songs listed in the Table of Contents—but it certainly helps to listen to the songs first. It only makes the book that much more enjoyable, I promise.

Click here to go to the playlist!

The e Before Christmas

Following my re-reading of Matt Beaumont’s e: A Novel, I discovered that he wrote a short sequel to it.  Further investigation revealed that it was made available digitally as a PDF from ebooks.com for a mere $4.25.  Sold!  All I needed was a handy reader for digital books (available free) and I was all set.  I don’t ever intend to own a Kindle or anything like that and prefer to hold a book in my hands, but this is a short 152 pages.  Not too hard to read on a laptop and much cheaper than the print version (which was going for a whopping $17).

The story begins in October 2000.  Following the tumultuous events in the first book, the new CEO has got her hands full with a Barbie campaign gone awry, new copywriters with attitude (and oddly, a complete lack of correct spelling), and a Christmas party that coincides with the Miller-Shanks European CEOs visiting the London branch.  Of course, that means David Crutton, the former London CEO will be making an appearance.

All of the old favorites are back in full form.  Suzi the crazy secretary  is more prominent this time and manages to step in it spectacularly.  Even Simon makes an appearance, which is awesome considering how he left the company in the previous book.

While it’s a shorter story and not nearly as good as the first, it’s nice to revisit these characters once more.  It’s especially fun to see Harriet step into the role of CEO and fall prey to the stresses of the job.  In retrospect, I’m now a little more sympathetic to David.

Overall, it was enjoyable and fun.  Apparently there’s another sequel, e Squared that has already been released in the UK and will be available here in January.  At this point, I’m invested enough in these characters to check it out.

e: A Novel by Matt Beaumont

I’m sure most of us have been introduced to the epistolary novel at some point.  Classic examples include Dracula, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liasons), The Color Purple — stories told exclusively through letters between characters.  This technique allows multiple viewpoints and narrators, often providing more than one version of events and truth.  This was especially used to great effect in Dangerous Liasons, with each letter presenting a facet of an elaborate and devious game.

Beaumont takes the spirit of the epistolary novel and the social intricacies found in Dangerous Liasons and updates it with emails sent back and forth in Miller-Shanks, a London advertising agency.

We’re first introduced to David Crutton, CEO of the London branch, as he sends a company-wide email reminding everyone that he intends to ring in the new millennium with rousing success.  Namely, he intends to land their biggest client, Coca-Cola.

Other characters soon follow: Pinki, a “hippie dipstick” copywriter who objects to everything she can.  Simon, a pretentious Creative Director who lapses into French phrasing mid-email in order to bolster his own importance and sophistication.  Suzi, Simon’s secretary and nosy drama queen of the highest order with an amazing superiority complex.  Harriet, a master of diplomacy and tact who is attempting to keep everyone from killing each other.

There are actually more characters than I can possibly list, enough to fill an office. While it’s hard to keep up with at first (I had to keep checking the names at the top of each email for a bit) I soon eased into it and began recognizing characters just from the content of their emails.  The rapid back and forth is entertaining, but the most enjoyable part is seeing just how far office politics and ass-kissing can go.  One character will eviscerate another for being creative, then turn around and spin it to the CEO as an example of his skills as a mentor.  Apparently Beaumont works as a copywriter, which explains his particular freakish knowledge of advertising and inter-office scheming.

Definitely recommended, especially for anyone who’s worked in an office setting.  Some parts of this book will seem painfully familiar, and it’s nice to be able to step back and giggle at the nonsense.

Kicking off the Cannonball Read!

As I had mentioned earlier, I’m participating in Pajiba’s Cannonball Read this year, along with a whole slew of other participants.  And I’m starting with a book that I adore.  Yes, I’ve read it before, but I picked it back up yesterday for the express purpose of reviewing it.

They Call Me Mad Dog: A Story for Bitter, Lonely People by Erika Lopez

The main character, Tomato Rodriguez is an artist.  By which I mean she makes sculptures of the male anatomy that Babeland afficianados would squee over.  She’s also head over heels in love with her girlfriend, Hodie.  The easy, comfortable kind of lesbian love that consists of watching Matlock reruns in a hazy bliss of uncoolness and contentment.  The older, more experienced Hodie promises to love only  Tomato forever in the waiting room of the free clinic and they celebrate their newfound monogamy by throwing away the latex gloves.

But once Tomato finds out that Hodie’s been cattin’ around on her, revenge is the only thing on her mind.  A botched kidnapping leads to Tomato being framed for murder, and she passes time in jail while she tries to figure out what went wrong and where.

But that little plot summary isn’t really capturing what I love about this book. Lopez fills the pages with her crazy, weird illustrations.  The story is brimming with pop culture references and flashbacks that are at best embarrassing and at worst wildly inappropriate.  She compares Oprah and Jerry Springer as opposing ways of life, claiming that on Jerry’s show “whether we’re black, yellow, red, or American blue we can all be proud white trash on parade.”  She is irreverent, she is insane, but most of all, she is hilarious.

Lastly, I’m including a favorite passage from the book, on how to deal with anger:

We give tissues for tears, we give hugs for accomplishments, and we hand over teddy bears in the dark. But when you get angry, some people cower and think it’s all over between you, while others threaten to drive powder blue Cadillacs through your front door. Therapists tell you to sit and feel the electricity of angr burning through your extremities, while religion tells you to just go do something nice for someone. Give them a corn cob duck . . .
Because although there might be that sisterhood thing poking up its little fallopian tentacles everywhere, that gets tedious and boring the way most NAACP stuff gets, so then it really all comes down to simply looking good, doesn’t it? Lots and lots of glitter. Puerto Ricans and drag queens knew it all the time.

Really, check this one out.  Though it might not be available in your library, you can find it online and in bookstores.  And if you really can’t find a copy no matter how hard you try, give me a call.  I have two.