(Edit -- this review is kinda messy and all over the place -- whenever I feel strongly about something I get kind of gushy and sloppy over it. I kinda want to take the part where I'm comparing it to Day of the Triffids and The Road and turn it into a separate essay)
War of the Worlds is one of those books that I never got around to reading because I always forgot that I hadn't done so already. HG Wells is one of those guys, like Lovecraft or Tolkien, that became a victim of his own popularity, and was mimicked so many times that it's sometimes easy to forget that they were actually the progenitors of what they were doing, and weren't relying on a bunch of pre-established tropes and cliches.
Skimming through some more recent reviews of War of the Worlds, I feel like it's fallen out of fashion a little bit in the last few years. It gets shit flung at it from all angles -- the sci-fi people hate it because it doesn't really explain anything scientific, the adventure story people hate it because it lacks a strong clear villain and is too classic-y, classics people hate it because it's too adventure-y, and the alien people hate it because they think it paints aliens as one-dimensional aggressors (lots of new agey people actually revile the book because they blame it as the sole reason why so many are inclined to assume that beings from another planet would be malevolent).
The plot of the book, also recently maligned, is well known at this point -- Martians land in England, and being to systematically destroy everything. People also seem to think it fails as a disaster story because not enough stuff actually burns down.
As always, I think people need to calm the fuck down, because they're missing the point. War of the Worlds was written in England and published in 1858 while the Empire was still going strong, and a large part of why the novel was so effectively terrifying and well received was because it showed how fragile and fallible all that shit could be. Novels and movies about a societal collapse are pretty common today, and I think it's important to remember how scary and powerful a well written book about that would have been if it hadn't been experienced before.
While the book may fail today in terms of shock and surprise, it succeeds wildly in two areas: how much STUFF it has to say, and how well it says it. Unlike a lot of other alien/adventure stories, which get by on an exciting plot that keeps you rushing through and turning pages, War of the Worlds takes its time with language and has some truly (surprisingly) beautiful moments of writing. At one point in the story, after all the shit hits the fan, the narrator ends up having to kill somebody. Later on, when reflecting on it, he says --
The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall’ I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had found him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge. We had been incapable of cooperation -- grim chance had taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford. But I did not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do. And I set this down as I have set all this story down, as it was. There were no witnesses -- all these things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as he will....
Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place -- a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity -- pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.
I'm sorry, but to me that's powerful shit that doesn't deserve to be shoved into the abysmal "genre fiction" dungeon.
Understandably, people often compare War of the Worlds with Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars series, but I think they have almost nothing in common except for having Martians as central figures. War of the Worlds actually has a lot more in common with John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, which would come half a century later, and would also become much disparaged and relegated to pulp-status, mainly because of the terrible movie with the same title. Not only did War of the Worlds almost (arguably) create the sci-fi genre, but it -- more successfully -- created the post-disaster genre. It would take 50 years for The Day of the Triffids to match it, and I don't think another novel has come close until 2006, when The Road by Cormac McCarthy was published. All three of these novels have been criticized for not having a strong, clear antagonist, because all three of these novels have -- I think possibly more so than Dostoevsky, though that might get me lynched -- shown that the specific nature of disaster is secondary in interest to how humanity as a group and people as individuals deal with it. Chances are that anyone with enough leisure time to sit down and read a book haven't been pushed to the extreme limits of where tragedy can push them, and hasn't had their strength tested or seen what they are or aren't capable of. The fact that something that seems almost arbitrary can cause the light we're reading by to go out and for our entire set of societal assumptions to collapse and leave us to fend for ourselves is, I think, even more of an effective means of terrifying a reader today than it was a century ago, since we're (generally) even more clueless and helpless about how to meet our basic needs than we were back then.
Wells makes repeated references to ants throughout the novel, and how often the narrator was reminded of the way they look to us compared to how we looked to the Martians. The other great message of War of the Worlds is to constantly remind us of the danger of our arrogance, a point driven home when the Martians themselves meet their own anticlimactic demise.
I'm hoping that at some point the general consensus on this book swings back in the other direction, because I think every single inch of its status as a classic is well deserved and I think it's probably one of the most important books ever written. Stupid movies and copycat books aside, War of the Worlds is one of those very, very, very few things that makes me proud to be human, even if it does so by reminding me of how pitiful and small and irrelevant we all are.
Rating: B+
Recommended For: Sci-fi and Alien fans, fans of disaster fiction, fans of human misery.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Book Review: Dog Days -- Diary of a Wimpy Kid
I wasn't familiar with the Wimpy Kid series when I first picked up this book. I was stuck in a rather unpleasant social situation (not at all the fault of the people I was with, mind you, I just wasn't feeling it and didn't have anything to say to anyone) and neglected to bring a book with me. I tried to look casual as I poked around the living room and kitchen desperately in search of ANYTHING to read, and ended up grabbing this as it was the only thing I could find besides crossword/suduku books (taking someone's book without asking and going off to isolate yourself in the middle of conversation is bad enough, and writing in one seemed to cross a line). I wasn't sure if it was going to be any good, but then I opened up to the first page and read --
"For me, summer vacation is basically a three-month guilt trip.
Just because the weather's nice, everyone expects you to be outside all day "frolicking" or whatever. And if you don't spend every second outdoors, people think there's something wrong with you. But the truth is, I've always been more of an indoor person.
The way I like to spend my summer vacation is in front of the TV, playing video games with the curtains closed and the lights off."
That sounded like a direct quotation from the diaries that me and all of my loser friends would have kept if we weren't too busy spending the summer trying to beat Banjo Kazooie to pick up a pen (it's true -- I actually got honestly upset that my evil mom and sister were making me go on a Caribbean cruise before I had finished this game in the summer of 98. I specifically recall staying on the ship several times when they went out to the beaches, rereading Nintendo Power and fantasizing about how I'd play it as soon as I got back to civilized society). If I had been able to actually put down the magazine and pick up something like this to read at that age, I would have rejoiced at finding a new role model and literary voice to speak for me (STFU, Holden Caulfield). I'm self obsessed and vain enough still so that, even as an adult, I will automatically enjoy anything that sounds like it was written by me, even when it is gentle (in this case) or severe (Notes From Underground?) self-parody.
Dog Days reads as the summer-long diary of Greg Heffley, a middle school kid who just wants to stay the fuck inside and be left alone to do his own thing. The quick read takes the reader through Greg's summer at a brisk pace but takes enough time to set up characterization, jokes, and awkward situations without making the whole thing seemed rushed or irrelevant. The book manages to highlight some of every awkward kid's worst summer nightmares -- public swimming pools, long car rides, time spent with a douchey friend's family -- while for the most part avoiding cliches that would make this seem like an obvious rehashing of similar stories done by better authors. The writing is solid -- Jeff Kinney is mostly convincing as the voice of a middle school student, only occasionally slipping into bitter adult-writing-in-retrospect-as-a-kid tone. The highlight, though, is probably the hilarious illustrations on every page. The writing may not have been enough to stand alone, but works really well with the illustrations as a sort of comic/short novel hybrid. I found myself genuinely excited to turn each page to see what the next would look like. The drawings are simple, but very effective for this kind of story.
Dog Days never gets particularly heavy or tries to pass itself off as a biting social commentary about the plight of the misunderstood child, and I was impressed that it never got preachy or took itself too seriously. It's nothing earth shattering or life changing, but it was a very pleasant way to spend a day that I would have otherwise had to have spent talking to other people and being sociable.
Rating: B
Recommended For: Comic fans, cranky underachievers, gaming nerds, light reading.
"For me, summer vacation is basically a three-month guilt trip.
Just because the weather's nice, everyone expects you to be outside all day "frolicking" or whatever. And if you don't spend every second outdoors, people think there's something wrong with you. But the truth is, I've always been more of an indoor person.
The way I like to spend my summer vacation is in front of the TV, playing video games with the curtains closed and the lights off."
That sounded like a direct quotation from the diaries that me and all of my loser friends would have kept if we weren't too busy spending the summer trying to beat Banjo Kazooie to pick up a pen (it's true -- I actually got honestly upset that my evil mom and sister were making me go on a Caribbean cruise before I had finished this game in the summer of 98. I specifically recall staying on the ship several times when they went out to the beaches, rereading Nintendo Power and fantasizing about how I'd play it as soon as I got back to civilized society). If I had been able to actually put down the magazine and pick up something like this to read at that age, I would have rejoiced at finding a new role model and literary voice to speak for me (STFU, Holden Caulfield). I'm self obsessed and vain enough still so that, even as an adult, I will automatically enjoy anything that sounds like it was written by me, even when it is gentle (in this case) or severe (Notes From Underground?) self-parody.
Dog Days reads as the summer-long diary of Greg Heffley, a middle school kid who just wants to stay the fuck inside and be left alone to do his own thing. The quick read takes the reader through Greg's summer at a brisk pace but takes enough time to set up characterization, jokes, and awkward situations without making the whole thing seemed rushed or irrelevant. The book manages to highlight some of every awkward kid's worst summer nightmares -- public swimming pools, long car rides, time spent with a douchey friend's family -- while for the most part avoiding cliches that would make this seem like an obvious rehashing of similar stories done by better authors. The writing is solid -- Jeff Kinney is mostly convincing as the voice of a middle school student, only occasionally slipping into bitter adult-writing-in-retrospect-as-a-kid tone. The highlight, though, is probably the hilarious illustrations on every page. The writing may not have been enough to stand alone, but works really well with the illustrations as a sort of comic/short novel hybrid. I found myself genuinely excited to turn each page to see what the next would look like. The drawings are simple, but very effective for this kind of story.
Dog Days never gets particularly heavy or tries to pass itself off as a biting social commentary about the plight of the misunderstood child, and I was impressed that it never got preachy or took itself too seriously. It's nothing earth shattering or life changing, but it was a very pleasant way to spend a day that I would have otherwise had to have spent talking to other people and being sociable.
Rating: B
Recommended For: Comic fans, cranky underachievers, gaming nerds, light reading.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Book Review: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
When Chris gave me my Christmas presents this year, I was surprised to see something that looked like it may possibly be a book. I’ve been asking him for years to buy me books, and he always complained that I had too many of them and would buy me things that he claimed that I either needed or would never buy for myself (clothing, shoes, a toothbrush…)
I was impressed by his boldness before even opening the gift -- buying a book for me is not an easy task unless I specifically mention which one I want. And Chris is not exactly a book person -- in my mind, I picture him walking into Barnes and Noble looking to pick something out for me to be like the way I am when I walk into American Eagle to try to buy him a shirt: dazed, confused, clueless, and helpless. I imagine him walking up to the cashier and asking “if this book doesn’t fit him, can I return it?”
I didn’t really know anything about this book except that I thought it was some kind of Oprah shit designed to give you a… what the fuck does she call it… an “uh-huh!” moment? An “ah-ha!“ moment? A “light bulb” moment? A sphincter-clenching moment? I expected it to be preachy, obvious, contrived, and cringe-worthy, and I felt guilty that I’d have to lie to him about whether or not I liked it.
For the most part my assumptions were accurate, except that I found myself enjoying it despite the emphatic protests of all the weeping angels of my better judgement. To be fair, I was definitely grading the book on a curve considering where it came from, but even my most generous mindset couldn’t forgive the opening paragraph --
“This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
Right from the start this made me angry and immediately put me on the defensive as a reader. From the second line it manages establish a pontificating, sententious tone and seems to set itself up for a couple of hundred pages of trite moralizing and giving us “revelations” about the struggles of every day life.
Again, for the most part this was the case -- a few chapters in, we get this earth-shattering truth revealed to us:
“But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger.”
The blue man put his warms on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.
“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know”.
(I think Marge Simpson said it better and more concisely at the end of the musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire [directed by Llewellyn Sinclair] when she sang “A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t yet…”)
So why am I giving this three stars? Well, despite its obvious flaws that anyone that has ever read anything that wasn’t an Oprah book club selection can point out, it made me cry a couple of times. And because I’m a sappy, sentimental fool. And because I’m a sucker for books about old people. And because it was a Christmas gift (this alone is worth a half star -- I would’ve given it 2 ½ otherwise) (this is probably why I could never review anything professionally).
I found myself becoming gradually attached to Eddie as the book plodded along -- he’s essentially just a placeholder, but being taken through his entire life from birth to death was an effective way of making you care about him in the absence of any actual plot or character development. The parts that deal with him and his wife were surprisingly emotional and well written and seemed out of place in the rest of the book -- they could maybe have been lifted from here and transplanted into some random Nicholas Sparks novel without missing a beat. My eyes were dripping like pre-cum down the side of a penile foreskin for the last couple of chapters, although if anyone had asked I would have lied and said I was crying tears of joy because it was almost over.
Most “serious” readers don’t need to waste their time with it, although it moves along quickly (I finished it in about three hours -- I have to admit, it was tough to put down) . For anyone looking for something a little bit light, or something kind of sweet, or someone who tends to like these kinds of books, though, it’s worth a read.
I was impressed by his boldness before even opening the gift -- buying a book for me is not an easy task unless I specifically mention which one I want. And Chris is not exactly a book person -- in my mind, I picture him walking into Barnes and Noble looking to pick something out for me to be like the way I am when I walk into American Eagle to try to buy him a shirt: dazed, confused, clueless, and helpless. I imagine him walking up to the cashier and asking “if this book doesn’t fit him, can I return it?”
I didn’t really know anything about this book except that I thought it was some kind of Oprah shit designed to give you a… what the fuck does she call it… an “uh-huh!” moment? An “ah-ha!“ moment? A “light bulb” moment? A sphincter-clenching moment? I expected it to be preachy, obvious, contrived, and cringe-worthy, and I felt guilty that I’d have to lie to him about whether or not I liked it.
For the most part my assumptions were accurate, except that I found myself enjoying it despite the emphatic protests of all the weeping angels of my better judgement. To be fair, I was definitely grading the book on a curve considering where it came from, but even my most generous mindset couldn’t forgive the opening paragraph --
“This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
Right from the start this made me angry and immediately put me on the defensive as a reader. From the second line it manages establish a pontificating, sententious tone and seems to set itself up for a couple of hundred pages of trite moralizing and giving us “revelations” about the struggles of every day life.
Again, for the most part this was the case -- a few chapters in, we get this earth-shattering truth revealed to us:
“But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger.”
The blue man put his warms on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.
“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know”.
(I think Marge Simpson said it better and more concisely at the end of the musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire [directed by Llewellyn Sinclair] when she sang “A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t yet…”)
So why am I giving this three stars? Well, despite its obvious flaws that anyone that has ever read anything that wasn’t an Oprah book club selection can point out, it made me cry a couple of times. And because I’m a sappy, sentimental fool. And because I’m a sucker for books about old people. And because it was a Christmas gift (this alone is worth a half star -- I would’ve given it 2 ½ otherwise) (this is probably why I could never review anything professionally).
I found myself becoming gradually attached to Eddie as the book plodded along -- he’s essentially just a placeholder, but being taken through his entire life from birth to death was an effective way of making you care about him in the absence of any actual plot or character development. The parts that deal with him and his wife were surprisingly emotional and well written and seemed out of place in the rest of the book -- they could maybe have been lifted from here and transplanted into some random Nicholas Sparks novel without missing a beat. My eyes were dripping like pre-cum down the side of a penile foreskin for the last couple of chapters, although if anyone had asked I would have lied and said I was crying tears of joy because it was almost over.
Most “serious” readers don’t need to waste their time with it, although it moves along quickly (I finished it in about three hours -- I have to admit, it was tough to put down) . For anyone looking for something a little bit light, or something kind of sweet, or someone who tends to like these kinds of books, though, it’s worth a read.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Up Too Late
5:41am. Just got home from the bar. I feel like I'm too old for this shit.
Nothing bad happened. I didn't even really drink. I had a couple of (LIGHT) beers just because I felt guilty sitting around and not buying anything (same reason why I sometimes buy books I don't even want if I'm in a tiny used bookstore). I had a good time sitting and talking with a couple of my friends for the majority of the night, and meeting some new people after they left. I got to talk about Star Trek/Wars and Tolkien a little.
I just feel fucking gross and used up for some reason. I spent the majority of the night having to deflect unwanted advances without being a dick about it -- and I think the gays and straight chicks reading this know how ridiculously impossible it is to subtly deflect a drunk guy's advances without being mean and hurting their feelings.
This isn't a "wah wah wah I'm so attractive it's hard to be so hot!!" kind of thing. I honestly and in all seriousness don't consider myself physically attractive and think that I'm probably average at best -- slightly above on a good day, slightly below on a bad day. I'm also one of the most awkward motherfuckers on the planet. But unfortunately, one of my ways of dealing with my extreme social discomfort is to force/fake a friendliness and ease with people that I don't actually feel. I'm learning that this works really well at work (waiting tables), but not so much at a bar, since most gay men are too fucking drunk and emotionally damaged to differentiate between friendliness and sexual interest.
I want to bitch about this subject more deeply and eloquently at some point, but it's now 5:48am and my goal was to be in bed before 6 (aiming for the stars, right?) so I should probably turn the damn computer off.
Tomorrow's goals: wake up at 11:30, start p90x by 12:15 (I've learned that I'm absolutely incapable of starting sooner than that -- especially in the winter. Waking up is a very slooooow and gradual process for me, and in the winter I'm like a lizard that needs to absorb a certain amount of heat before it can move), finish by 2, shower and leave for work by 2:45. Force a smile all night at work and attempt to be pleasant to the people around me. Get a little fucked up at a friend's place after work.
Thursday: Wake up no later than 10:30 and head to work for the lunch shift around 11 (the benefits of spending the night with a friend who lives in Manhattan -- ordinarily I have to wake up at 8:45). Get a haircut and do some late Christmas shopping during my break. Back to work 6-10, head to Brooklyn, squeeze in p90x, go to bed at a decent hour (ughhh), wake up early (ughhhhhhhhhhhh) and with any kind of luck, manage to smoothly get onto a Chinatown bus to Maryland on Friday morning.
5:53. Seven minutes to STOP RELOADING FARMVILLE, take out my contacts, and go to bed.
Nothing bad happened. I didn't even really drink. I had a couple of (LIGHT) beers just because I felt guilty sitting around and not buying anything (same reason why I sometimes buy books I don't even want if I'm in a tiny used bookstore). I had a good time sitting and talking with a couple of my friends for the majority of the night, and meeting some new people after they left. I got to talk about Star Trek/Wars and Tolkien a little.
I just feel fucking gross and used up for some reason. I spent the majority of the night having to deflect unwanted advances without being a dick about it -- and I think the gays and straight chicks reading this know how ridiculously impossible it is to subtly deflect a drunk guy's advances without being mean and hurting their feelings.
This isn't a "wah wah wah I'm so attractive it's hard to be so hot!!" kind of thing. I honestly and in all seriousness don't consider myself physically attractive and think that I'm probably average at best -- slightly above on a good day, slightly below on a bad day. I'm also one of the most awkward motherfuckers on the planet. But unfortunately, one of my ways of dealing with my extreme social discomfort is to force/fake a friendliness and ease with people that I don't actually feel. I'm learning that this works really well at work (waiting tables), but not so much at a bar, since most gay men are too fucking drunk and emotionally damaged to differentiate between friendliness and sexual interest.
I want to bitch about this subject more deeply and eloquently at some point, but it's now 5:48am and my goal was to be in bed before 6 (aiming for the stars, right?) so I should probably turn the damn computer off.
Tomorrow's goals: wake up at 11:30, start p90x by 12:15 (I've learned that I'm absolutely incapable of starting sooner than that -- especially in the winter. Waking up is a very slooooow and gradual process for me, and in the winter I'm like a lizard that needs to absorb a certain amount of heat before it can move), finish by 2, shower and leave for work by 2:45. Force a smile all night at work and attempt to be pleasant to the people around me. Get a little fucked up at a friend's place after work.
Thursday: Wake up no later than 10:30 and head to work for the lunch shift around 11 (the benefits of spending the night with a friend who lives in Manhattan -- ordinarily I have to wake up at 8:45). Get a haircut and do some late Christmas shopping during my break. Back to work 6-10, head to Brooklyn, squeeze in p90x, go to bed at a decent hour (ughhh), wake up early (ughhhhhhhhhhhh) and with any kind of luck, manage to smoothly get onto a Chinatown bus to Maryland on Friday morning.
5:53. Seven minutes to STOP RELOADING FARMVILLE, take out my contacts, and go to bed.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Book Review: When You Are Engulfed in Flames
My favorite thing about reading David Sedaris is that it always feels like I’m spending time hanging out with my faggy, cigarette-smoking best friend, staying up late and making fun of people. Nobody is spared while I’m crankily waving smoke away from my face and begging him to move closer to the window -- crippled people, dead people, old people, Jews, and least of all, ourselves. It may not always be the most stimulating or thought provoking conversation, but it’s something that I desperately need and crave for my own sanity, and likewise I always find myself looking forward to each of Sedaris’s new releases as if this friend was going to be back in New York visiting me after a couple of years away, and in the interim all I had to speak to were a bunch of college professors.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames continues where our last late night bitch-fest left off in 2004 with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, with both of us seeming a little more tired and old, but still filled with a few good stories and more than a few good bitchy remarks. It’s a little more subtle and less punch line focused than the previous book, and a lot more self-conscious than earlier books like Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing -- it works really well in stories like That’s Amore, about an elderly woman who lived in his apartment building, and Old Faithful, a surprisingly sweet story about him and his boyfriend’s aging monogamous relationship (it must be nice to have someone be willing to lance your pus-filled boils for you and still want to sleep with you afterwards -- I haven’t quite reached that point in any of my relationships).
One complaint that I’ve noticed a few reviewers bitching about, though, is that he’s fallen victim to the same thing that fucks up most successful essayists after a certain point. Early books have a whole lifetime of material to draw from, while later books seem to have progressively less and less and become a lot more self conscious and talk too much about being famous, money, etc. It makes the stories a lot less approachable, and for whatever reason, a lot less funny. Sedaris does this a little bit here, but I think he’s a good enough writer to make it not matter so much as it did when, say, Michael Moore became a recognizable person and his post-Bowling for Columbine documentaries reeked of celebrity bullshit.
One of the things that has always made David Sedaris so approachable and welcoming is that he’s always almost gleefully shared with us the worst parts of himself -- his selfishness, his vanity, his insecurity, his self-centeredness, and all the other things that most of us normally pretend we don’t think and feel. These strengths lend themselves much better to the transition into self conscious fame-writing than if he had always been writing about what a normal, down to Earth person he was, and how he loved a normal, quiet life. No, this isn’t his best work, but I also don’t think it’s egregiously inferior or horrible like I hear a lot of other people whining about. Think Samantha in the Sex and the City movie getting together with the girls as soon as she gets in from LA -- it’s a little weird at first, but all differences and changes are quickly forgiven when everyone realizes what a good time they’re having.
And if any straight men are reading this, I’m really, really sorry for that reference. I can blow you if it’ll make you feel better.
Unrealistic Hopes for 2010
Like most people, every year around this time I go on and on about ways to facilitate creating A New and Better Me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -- most of these are forgotten by the end of January, and the last few usually die out around the time that I'm having some kind of awful couple fight on Valentine's Day. This is probably another one of those lists.
Another thing I do every year is talk about how the previous year has been the worst one of my life. I'm also doing this again. I can say without hyperbole that 2009 was the worst year that I've had so far (though I also said the same thing about 2008).
It was just...a huge fucking waste. I can't even really say that it had a lot of blown potential -- I started out 2009 in a really shitty way, and I figured that nothing major was going to change. I kind of want to try to blame the shittiness solely on my attitude, but there was more to it than that.
At any rate, I'm (at the moment) really committed toward making 2010 count for something. If I'm trying to force any kind of positive spin on 2009, I can say that I definitely learned how NOT to conduct myself in a way that is conducive to health, vitality, and happiness. Keeping that in my mind, I'm going to compile a short list of things to work on in 2010 and beyond.
-- Less internet. More constructive use of the time I DO spend on the internet.
If 2008 had a lot of wasted time pumped into Pokemon, 2009 trumped that with my discovery of Farmville. It's crazy and completely pointless. I've put off SEX for Farmville. I let my reading, writing, and exercise all fall off to the side so I could fuck around on Farmville and reload Facebook over and over again. It's a fucking compulsive sickness for me at this point -- I can't pass a computer without clicking refresh. The rest of the time is wasted looking at Tori Amos and figure skating stuff (gaygaygaygaygaygaygaygaygay).
I'm not going to give up on Farmville completely -- I'm too competitive for that -- but I want to make it so that I give myself an allotted time slot for it so that it doesn't eat into the time I should be spending doing other things. If I'm really not in the mood to do anything else and really do just want to sit at the computer, instead of sitting here mindlessly reloading all these fucking things, I can be replying to emails/messages, researching stuff, and writing.
-- Try to pretend that my alarm clock doesn't have a snooze button.
Seriously. I can divide people into two groups -- those that are snooze people, and those that aren't. I am a chronic, helpless, hopeless snoozer. I despise it. I'll never do it to the point where I'm late -- I'm actually NEVER late for work -- but I'll do it until the exact last minute that I have to get out of bed, shower, and leave the house to get there. Which means I don't eat breakfast, don't work out, don't write, don't RELAX, just so I can fucking keep my lazy ass in bed and do nothing. It's not like I'm SLEEPING for that extra time -- it's so fucking counterproductive and ridiculous. I end up being much more tired than I would have been otherwise because I end up having to rush instead of being able to get ready at a leisurely pace. This morning I had my alarm set for 11:30 and didn't get up until 1:30. Two hours of getting up every ten minutes to hit that fucking button. I wish there was a way I could program my alarm clock to give me an electric shock every time I try to touch it. Maybe I can get Chris to work on that for me.
-- Be less sexually driven. Value people for other things.
I can usually only force myself to leave my house for two reasons: work and sex. If not the actual physical act of sex, then at least to be put in situations where it's either a possibility, or at the very least, planting seeds for future encounters. It leads to very boring thoughts and very boring writing and I'm tired of going back and reading pages and pages and pages of innocuous nymphomaniac bullshit in my journals. Also, a VAST majority of my stress in 2009 was boy-related and sex-related. Find other things to do with people. Talk to more lesbians.
-- Drink less alcohol.
This isn't a huge deal -- my drinking has never been dangerous or out of control. I'm way too neurotic and self monitoring for that. I'd really just like to save myself a little bit of money and calories. I rarely go out and get fucked-the-fuck up, and when I do it's usually a nice/fun change of pace, but I'd like to keep it to just one or two drinks, one night a week. I generally go out to Pieces on Tuesdays still, and that's fine. Every now and then I'll add in a second bar night if I'm meeting up with someone or have a specific reason to go, but that's it -- I spent way too much money in bars in 2009.
-- Do more drugs.
This probably seems contradictory to the less alcohol thing, but it's not really. I'm not going to turn into a heroin/coke person. But I have good experiences with the lighter hippie shit, and plan to continue doing so as long as I use them in a constructive way and not as an escape.
-- Communicate more.
I want to be a better and more emotionally available friend. I'm usually a really lazy communicator and over-use things like texts and facebook comments in place of more personal/direct communication. I'm going to try to write more emails and letters and use AIM a little more when I'm having computer time, see more people outside of a bar context, and... gulp... talk on the phone. Not often, mind you, but I'd like to start slow and have maybe one or two phone conversations a week, and see where it goes from there.
God, I hate the phone.
-- Eat more moderately.
Notice that I didn't say "eat better" or "eat healthier" or "NO MORE DESSERT!" or anything ridiculous that we ALL know I won't actually follow through with. I feel like this is the best way of phrasing it if I want to stick with it.
My sister bought me a wonderful huge box of brownies for Christmas and I love it. I find myself opening the box several times a day just to smell them and look at them. Ordinarily, these would have been gone in a day or two. But they're individually wrapped, and I've been trying to savor them. One (okay, sometimes two) a night has been working really well for me. I don't feel deprived or insane/angry. I'm going to try to bring this mindset with me into the rest of the year. Likewise, smaller portions, more fresh fruit/vegetable crap, a LITTLE less carbs/sugar, blahblahblah whogivesashit.
-- Learn Italian, at least a little bit.
I have The Rosetta Stone Italian program now and I've been fucking around with it a little. I want to get more disciplined with it. I'm around a lot of Italian speaking people now because of work, and so I have no excuses. If possible I'd like to find a way to get to Italy at some point either this year or next and maybe take a class. I can't really explain why this is so important to me -- practically, socially, and, um, sexually, it makes a lot more sense for me to learn to speak Spanish or Japanese, but this is the one I really want to do.
Besides, there's something kind of hot about not understanding a word that the person I'm fucking is saying, and pretending I don't know what "no!!!" means. Most boys decrease in value considerably if you have to listen to them talk.
-- Write more.
I'm going back and forth about whether or not I want to add "read less" next to that. I don't think I'm going to -- I think that I should read the same amount and just find more time to write from the time I spend on Facebook or jerking off. I want to have at least the skeleton of a short novel done this year and a few stories finished, as well as a fairly prolific blog and an updated journal. No matter what I have to write SOMETHING every day, even if I'm just talking about sex.
I have such a huge amount of fear tied up with my writing, and I constantly surprise myself with how deeply it goes. I'm really fickle with most things, but there have been two things in my life that I've always wanted to do and never felt wishy-washy about: I wanted to go into outer space, and from my earliest memories of my grandmother reading me bedtime stories and my grandfather showing me his encyclopedias, I wanted to write books. I don't really remember a single thing from my last year of highschool, but I still remember how excited and proud of myself I felt the first time I read The Cat in the Hat by myself, how "cool" (heh) I felt reading my first Babysitter Club book in 1st or 2nd grade, and the way that I could see whole entire worlds open up for me the first time I read Matilda, my first Roald Dahl book, and every other literary milestone in my life. It's all I ever REALLY wanted to do with myself, and I feel like I really should be working on that more seriously -- or at least, more than I work on getting laid.
If I would write half as much as I fucked, or spend a quarter of the time I spend THINKING about fucking thinking about writing instead, I'd probably have at least six books written already.
-- Be more adventurous with baking. Be less afraid of cooking.
I love baking, but most of the shit I want to make is expensive and time consuming and then I get too lazy to do it on day off. And I NEVER cook -- I'm not gonna lie - as much as I like Food Network and I'm obsessed with food, I really, really, REALLY do prefer it being made FOR me, preferably by someone I can fuck in return for it. I'm never gonna be this OMG AMAZING COOK!!!!!!!!!, but I want to at least get better at cooking for myself and not be so neurotic/tense about it.
-- Exercise. Shut up, stop whining, just do it.
(Self explanatory. Never gonna like it or enjoy it, but it's a necessity, unfortunately.)
Okay, this dragged on way longer than I meant it to, and it's already almost 5am. Motherfucker. I might add to this list later on. As for now, I want to try to get in some book time and then pass out.
Rob
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Books of 2009
(I'm going to be trying to start this blog up again. My resolution this year was to try to write at least a little bit every day in SOME kind of form, and a blog is a nice lazy way to kind of cheat and get that out of the way)
Anyway, I had a goal to get to 50 books in 2009 -- I didn't quite make it in 2008 because... uh... I discovered Pokemon in 2008 and so that ate into most of my subway time where I'd normally be reading. I did make it this year, but cheated a little by counting comics (if they're collected in one volume I think it counts).
My favorites are bolded. If I'm not too lazy this weekend I might try to do a top ten list kind of thing.
My favorites are bolded. If I'm not too lazy this weekend I might try to do a top ten list kind of thing.
1) The Children of Hurin -- J.R.R. Tolkien
2) In The Miso Soup -- Ryu Murakami
3) Persuasion -- Jane Austen
4) Fight Club -- Chuck Palahniuk
5) Lucifer Vol. 1
6) Lucifer Vol. 2
7) Lucifer Vol. 3
8) Lucifer Vol. 4
9) Lucifer Vol. 5
10) Lucifer Vol. 6
11) Lucifer Vol. 7
12) Lucifer Vol. 8
13) Lucifer Vol. 9
14) Lucifer Vol. 10
15) Lucifer Vol. 11
16)War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy
17) B is for Beer -- Tom Robbins
18) Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
19) The Robber Bride -- Margaret Atwood
20) The Stolen Child -- Keith Donohue
21) Love in the Time of Cholera -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22) Twilight -- Stephanie Meyer
23) Gilgamesh -- Derek Hines
24) The Trial -- Franz Kafka
25) Three Guineas -- Virginia Woolf
26) Live and Let Die -- Ian Fleming
27) Dancing Girls -- Margaret Atwood
28) Watchmen -- Alan Moore
29) The Eye in the Pyramid -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
30) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
31) Oryx and Crake -- Margaret Atwood
32) The Sirens of Titan -- Kurt Vonnegut
33) The Golden Apple -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
34) Official Book Club Selection -- Kathy Griffin
35) Maps and Legends -- Michael Chabon
36) The Year Of The Flood -- Margaret Atwood
37) Lost Girls -- Alan Moore
38) Leviathan -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
39) Kitchen -- Banana Yoshimoto
40) New Moon -- Stephanie Meyer
41) Look at the Birdie -- Kurt Vonnegut
42) Almost Transparent Blue -- Ryu Murakami
43) The Mysteries of Pittsburgh -- Michael Chabon
43) The Mysteries of Pittsburgh -- Michael Chabon
44) Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters -- Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters
45) Baseball in April -- Gary Soto
46) Child of God -- Cormac McCarthy
47) A Princess of Mars -- Edgar Rice Burroughs
48) The Integral Trees -- Larry Niven
49) The Time Machine -- H.G. Wells
50) Amrita -- Banana Yoshimoto
51) Alien Xmas -- Stephen Chiodo & Jim Strain
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