shopping and the sister

I met Mares's boyfriend this weekend. Nice enough guy. I felt no click of recognition, the kind you might feel when meeting someone you can talk with. Not a lot of conversation. Here's a brief sketch of the weekend: 4-hour drive in the truck to Atlanta (mostly uneventful, which is good), brief visit at the apartment, trip to a pool hall/restaurant to play cut-throat, back to apartment to play Monopoly, early to bed. Sunday was a quick cup of coffee, then Mares told me that she wasn't interested in going with me to IKEA, which is understandable. I would have rather gotten brunch myself. Which didn't happen either. In fact, I felt that she ditched me in favor of going somewhere with the boyfriend. So to sum up: silent boyfriend, no sister-and-sister time, and a curtailed visit, all of which must have been motivated by a reason I don't know.

She had seemed like she was excited by my visit, and I was excited to see her. Instead, I'm saddened by the whole thing. Mary is the family member I feel closest to, and it hurts to think that my visit might have been a chore to her instead of a pleasure.

The IKEA part, the part of my trip that I dreaded, happened to be the most successful portion of my trip. Weird.

A reply to J-P's comment on the previous post

My response was getting so long that it made more sense to put it into a comment of its own. The Kindle (and devices like it) probably are boons to inveterate travelers. Books are heavy!

J-P, the questions you ask regarding paper books generally provoke tons of (let's say) vigorous discourse in my field. I could definitely imagine a future in which owning paper books becomes a luxury, a electronic books and their attendant devices drop in price. Just as it is now a luxury to own a horse for now good reason. (Also heavy.)

I believe that the codex (even if not made with paper) will and should endure, but that we'll use it differently, perhaps with more respect or shared ownership within a community. Codices resist change and censorship more easily than electronic documents do. The paper book signifies a drain to our environment, but how does that compare to the environmental impact of producing, distributing, and recycling electronic devices and the infrastructure that they require? (That might be an unanswerable question at this point.)

What I do know is that many codices are beautiful in themselves. As are those luxury horses. (But with less poop.)

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And now a question regarding my own crappy paperback codices: Does anyone know how to get one's paperbacks re-covered to make them hardbacks? Most of our books are paperbacks, and I like to imagine them as cloth-covered hardbacks, in a range of colors. As a child, I lusted after the huge library of leather-bound books that belonged to one of my father's colleagues. They had a pleasing uniformity of size and color, with exotic names on their spines, like "Seneca" (an Indian chief?) and "Cato the Elder." Now I know I don't want any leather books or the authors in their canon. But it's really cool to think of a cloth-covered canon of our own. So if any of you people know where I could get this done, or anyone on Etsy who would do it, please let me know.

How to start a fire

I miss reading good books but cannot give up the luxury of a quiet voice reading me to sleep. Nevertheless, no illusion stands between an audiobook and actual reading.

In the service of trying to do more real reading, I checked out the Kindle, a device Amazon is pushing. Its screen works like paper, sort of, allowing the user to read even in bright daylight. It also connects to Amazon through a cellular network, allowing fast and free downloading of comparatively inexpensive books anywhere a cell phone can connect. It's ugly and expensive and technologically selfish, but most reviews were positive.

After some thought, I realized that the new device wouldn't solve my central problem. And—this is important—the thing can't retain the physical elements of a paper book, like page layout, paper quality, typeface that isn't Cambria. You can do what I plan to do (here in a minute). Pick up the closest book and smell it. Turn the pages and listen. Look at its age, and open it until the spine cracks. Smush the pages and write your name on the surfaces that creates. Read it until the page falls away, in that mysterious process of becoming absorbed.

Now call me Ned Lud. 

Seeing problems

I'm thrilled that Obama won, but now that it's Thursday (2 days after the historical victory of the spirit of our great country), I'm back to thinking about me. I'll bring it back around to the political, so bear with me.

When I was a very small girl, I had night-terrors. I would wake my parents, my father would try to soothe me with milk and tales of tryptophan, and then he would send me off to bed. They eventually got a little impatient with that routine. So I got into the habit of getting myself out of bed, drinking some milk, and reading on the living room couch.

One night (I was probably around 8), I awoke from a nightmare, and we were out of milk. I got my book, but feeling especially sorry for myself, I sat on the couch and cried. The sobbing woke my father, and for some reason, I didn't want to tell him why I was sad. Instead I blamed it on the book. (In retrospect, the book, The Secret Garden, may have set the mood.) He took it away from me and sent me back to bed. I assigned fault to the book, and my father accepted that assignment. (The truth came out later. That night and others like it were nascent expressions of what came to be my mental illness.) No matter why I lied—shame, my need to please, their demand for me to be perfect—this memory strikes me as a metonym for the lies my family used about my true need for help.

I don't raise this specter of self-pity to simply rile your emotion. Rather, it's a micronic (not a word but should be) analog of what we as Americans do as a nation. We lie to each other about the "housing bubble," say, then the bad mortgages, then the interest rates, even as they compile upon adjacent economic injuries. Only crisis draws enough truth around itself, and by doing so is revealed.

As we celebrate President Elect Obama—it feels so good to write that phrase—we hope to wait for him to take office so that he can address what's happening in our country and in the world. Will we lie to each other or will we point to the tide of the next crisis? Can we even see it yet? Where is the child, the book, the father? Let me say that I have great confidence in Obama's leadership. Having a post-Boomer, Black president should cause us joy, but may it not blind us to his need to please and our demand for his perfection. May it not blind us to our continuing moral problems, both at home, abroad, and in those nebulous, lawless plots of land we refuse to claim as our own. May the smug enjoyment of our right choice not deflect our insight: Electing Obama does not make America virtuous. It simply makes us better.

First, the voting; second, my self-centered celebration

Sam and I voted last Monday. Organizations that try to get out the vote offer a lot of reasons: doing your civic duty, taking advantage of a right that we cherish, changing the current regime, crack. (My thanks to John Oliver and Acorn for that last one.) They add up to the same basic tenet, that without individual action and participation in government, America ceases to exist. The U.S. as we know it ceases to exist. Representative democracy evaporates, without which our constitutional republic fails. Regardless of party, no one (I honestly believe) wants an oligarchy. 

Every time I watch one of those commercials for voting or for voting (like the one Tiffany has up on her blog right now) and Obama, I think about the one thing that ties U.S. citizens together. It's not culture, it's not region, it's not attitudes or values, it's not even geography. Why would I identify myself as connected with someone living hundreds of miles from me in one direction (Houston, TX: 856 mi) more than someone in a different distant direction (Toronto, ON: 774 mi) or another (soldiers in Iraq)? Because we all get to see who our next President will be on Tuesday. We all participate in the same government, the same political experiment.

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In other news, I got great feedback on my most recent draft. A wonderful feeling.