In the holding tank I built for myself
It’s feeding time
And I start to feel afraid
‘Cause I’m the last one left in line.
The endless string of summer storms
That led me to today
Began one afternoon with you
Long ago and far away.
And someone leads the beast in on his chain
But I know you’re thinking of me
‘Cause it’s just about to rain.
So I won’t be afraid of anything ever again.
In the cell that holds my body back
The door swings wide
And I feel like someone’s lost child
As the guards lead me outside.
If the clouds are gathering
It’s just to point the way
To an afternoon I spent with you
When it rained all day
And someone leads the beast in on his chain
But I know you’re thinking of me
‘Cause it’s just about to rain.
So i won’t be afraid of anything ever again.
Strange couple of weeks, again. I am having the hardest time yanking myself out of vampire mode, and it’s driving me crazy. It’s 4:34 in the morning as I write this and for the past two hours, I’ve pretty much been up just to be up, like when I was young and stupid. As I’ve written here before, my folks were pretty strict about bedtimes when I was growing up. I asked my dad why my sister and I couldn’t stay up as late as we wanted on weekends, like some of our friends, and he said because then we’d just stay up until we dropped, staying up late just to stay up. He insisted we wouldn’t be mature enough to put ourselves to bed when we were tired.
Dang it. He was so right. Once I got out of high school, I turned into a total night owl, something my parents are well aware of. I don’t know why I’m like this. I was like this in college almost forever, except when my sister started getting her own rides to school. Then I started getting up at five to beat the traffic out to Manoa. If there’s something I love more than the dark, lonesome hours of the middle of the night, it’s the dark, lonesome hours of the early morning.
I have had two graveyard shift jobs, both of them when I was in college. If only I could do that kind of thing in my current profession.
And: if only I could find somewhere to swim in these late, late hours. I wouldn’t stress out about getting to the beach so early. I mean somewhere to swim where it’s private and the water’s not dark. I need to write my best-seller so I can get my own pool, dang it.
I’m not going to the beach this morning either. It drives me insane that I can’t discipline myself enough to make the best of these vacation days. If I were somehow doing something meaningful and productive with my vampire hours, perhaps I wouldn’t feel so bad, but what I am mostly doing is indulging the vampire in me by staying up, something I can’t do enough of during the school year.
I’ve read two books since my last review but have been unable to review them. Actually, the one I just finished this evening would be easy to review, but the one I read just before that is proving difficult, and I want to do that one first or I’ll never get it done. I might just have to do it non-creatively, just getting the basic stuff down so that I can move on. The trouble is that I think the book deserves better than that, and that’s what’s freezing me up. Gotta turn off that internal editor.
A former student of mine, now employed at UHM, wrote in her blog several weeks ago about daikon legs. I kind of want to send her my own daikon legs piece, but I don’t send people I know in real life links to this journal. Maybe I’ll just copy and paste it into an email.
I’ve been really in a foul mood for the past few days, an extended period of grouchiness that’s unusual even for me. I keep dwelling on some unpleasant thoughts and it’s adding a bitter taste to almost everything I do or say. I think I need to get back into my early-summer routine. If nothing else, it kept me too tired to focus on negativity.
That schoolmate Heidi I mentioned in my dream entry a couple of weeks ago? I friended her on FB just so I could ask her if she happened to have a younger sister I didn’t know about. No younger sister. It was worth a shot.
It’s a tie between bears and elephants. I don’t think we have bears at our zoo, so at least here at home, it would be elephants. They are so noble and admirable.
What’s your favorite circus act?
I dislike circuses after what happened in 1994. I won’t go to a circus that has wild animal acts. In fact, that 1994 circus was the last circus to visit Hawaii, and good riddance. However, of non-animal acts, I have to be honest. I like any that involve pretty girls.
When did you last attend (or participate in) a parade?
I really don’t like parades either. Most people know I hate crowds, so you are VERY unlikely ever to see me in attendance at one. When I was a Boy Scout, my troop annually marched in the Wahiawa Veterans Day Parade. That was a nice tradition. My last would have been in 1986.
When did you last attend a sporting event?
In March or April, I went to a baseball game between my alma mater Hawaii Pacific University and Pacific University at Hans L’Orange Park. We won.
What unique festivals does your area feature in celebration of some kind of food?
Well, there’s the Waikiki Spam Jam, which I have never attended. Kona has a coffee festival I’ve never attended but would really like to. And some people I know just attended the Kapalua Wine Festival. That would be really fun to attend, too.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I didn’t know there were tribal agrarian peoples in Vietnam who were not officially involved in the war. I don’t think I’m especially ignorant about these things, so I admit I was surprised to learn about the Rhade people, a tribe in the southern part of that country, some of whom helped American Special Forces to navigate the Vietnam jungles.
This is the best thing Cynthia Kadohata‘s A Million Shades of Gray has going for it. The story of Y’Tin, a young elephant handler who longs to quit school so that he may pursue his dream of training other elephant handlers, is a glimpse at a culture I was completely unaware of. After the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the Americans leave a Vietnam that is divided North and South, assuring the Rhade that if the armies of the North should aggressively move into the South, they will return to help.
Y’Tin is the youngest elephant handler his village has ever seen. Although he is a talented tracker and his father is a successful tobacco farmer, elephants are his passion and he is sure he will spend the rest of his life caring for them. But the northern armies are moving south, and the Americans don’t seem to be coming back. Y’Tin is worried about what his village will do in response as his way of life and the survival of his people are thrown into jeopardy.
It’s an interesting story, but largely unsatisfying. Y’Tin’s character is rather shallowly defined, and although Kadohata’s descriptions of everyday life in his village are interesting, her story feels flat and it doesn’t resolve well. I am currently a few chapters into Kadohata’s Weedflower, and already it has the deep, poetic, heartbreaking beauty I remember from her Newbery-winning Kira-Kira. A Million Shades of Gray lacks that depth, and although it’s a pretty good read, it’s fair to call this one a mild disappointment.
My first two weeks of summer vacation were glorious. I spent a few days in what really amounts to hibernation, like I do during all my breaks. When we were in college, R was convinced that she could catch up on missed sleep during breaks after trimesters, then bank sleep for the upcoming trimesters. That wasn’t my experience then, but since I’ve hit middle age, I’m changing my tune. I do need recovery sleep, and I need lots of it, and if I can get a week of lots (I’m talking ten to twelve hours per night) of sleep at the end of my summer, I can handle at least the first half of the semester without worrying too much about getting lots of it then. Yes, I know it’s not supposed to work that way, but it seems to work that way for me.
After my period of hibernation, I was up at dawn every morning for a swim. I’d come home for some television, housekeeping, and a late-morning nap. Then I’d be up to get some work done. Late afternoons I’d be at the park for a long walk. I’d call it a run-walk if more of it were running, but I’m pathetic.
It was working out pretty well, but I didn’t plan well and that resulted in my Week of Extreme Frugality. I have them often, to be sure, but I don’t usually have to watch my gasoline use, as I have this past week. It’s cut out my swims and most of my walks for reasons I don’t want to get into. I know I can walk anywhere, but walking somewhere while I’ve got a few bucks in my pocket works much better. And I really, really, really had to watch the spending.
So I’ve stayed home, venturing down to the shopping center once a day to pick up my daily allotment of whatever I needed. If you give yourself a daily task like that, you don’t feel so miserable. My funds weren’t ZERO, but they weren’t much more than that, so I spread it out over what looks like is going to be just over a week, spending a buck here or two bucks there for the things that make the difference between being utterly depressed and being just unhappy. I also had a few Starbucks gift cards from students. Those allowed me to spend ninety minutes to two hours a few times just reading and sipping tea outside the house. Those gift cards are among my best friends, I tell you.
I’ve reverted to vampire mode, something I do easily during my time off from work when I don’t structure my days, and that actually helped. If the bulk of your waking hours is after all the fun stuff is closed or after you might be hanging with friends, the solitude doesn’t feel like deprivation so much as indulgence. This has resulted, too, in lots of time with the television on, something I don’t normally take. Lots of World Cup soccer and Wimbledon tennis, not to mention old movies and just about every news broadcast I could fit in.
I hate it when I put myself in this position, and this has been the worst it’s been in a long time. When I eventually get out of it (late Monday, here’s hoping), I’m going to have to be more attentive.
I’m having a weird week, about which I shall expound more later. Part of the weirdness has resulted in my watching a lot of television, ‘though that really has nothing to do with Saturday night. Beginning at 10:30 on Saturdays, I get SNL, then (often) Soundstage, then (usually) Austin City Limits.
One of the things I love about SNL is the way that on any given night, you could see the funniest thing you’ve ever seen on the tube. You’re more likely to see something lame, but there’s always the possibility that the next sketch could be the next “Samurai Delicatessen,” “Wayne’s World,” or “Schmitt’s Gay.” I love that feeling. And it would be that way even without the musical performances, which really double the anticipation.
It’s the same thing with Soundstage and Austin City Limits. Although my machine is set to record both programs every week, I usually can’t wait until later to watch them, and few programs have given me more pleasure in the past few months.
This evening, it was a couple of excellent repeats. Lynyrd Skynyrd on Soundstage and Nick Lowe for the first half of Austin City Limits. The Swell Season, not quite as excellent but still very good, had the second half.
I mentioned out loud last summer that I really needed to spend some time educating myself about Nick Lowe, and I did explore some of his tunes this past year. This performance was better even than most of the stuff I listened to.
These aren’t the exact performances I saw this evening, but they’re close. They make me want to pick up my guitar and write something.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I love baseball. Love it in that geeky way that even most baseball fans don’t love it. I keep score when I watch games in person or on television. When I travel to the continental United States I bring my scorebook with me in case I see a game. So when I heard that Newbery laureate Linda Sue Park wrote a book about keeping score, I knew I had to read it.
Maggie is an elementary-schooler who, like almost everyone in her neighborhood in the early 1950s, is a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. She spends afternoons listening to games on the radio with her friends at the local fire station. A young firemen named Jim introduces Maggie to the intellectually stimulating practice of keeping score. Maggie is so hooked that she invents new notations to record game events for which no established traditional notations exist.
It would be a shame if the baseball stuff in this book prevents readers from getting through it, because it’s not a book about baseball; it’s a book about growing up during wartime. Maggie’s friend Jim is drafted for service in the Korean war, and with fierce loyalty and determination, Maggie does what she can in her sixth-grade way to support him until he can return. Not content only to send CARE packages, she attempts to understand as much about the war as she can in search of a way to help bring him back.
Linda Sue Park writes a touching story that should appeal to middle- and late-elementary school readers who can appreciate Maggie’s passion even if they don’t sympathize. I would encourage such readers not to focus on the baseball part of Maggie’s obsession but on the aspects of the game that appeal to her, or at the very least to endure the first half of the book until it becomes no longer a book about baseball. Unlike other Park books I’ve read, I don’t think older middle-schoolers or high-schoolers are likely to respond well to the writer’s voice in this novel, which definitely slants younger.
I’ve been debating all day whether or not to write this one down, but I don’t want to forget it, so I’m going to do my best to put it down exercising all due discretion but not changing any details, because when it comes to dreams, the littlest detail can be very important. Here goes.
It frustrates me that I can’t remember how it begins, but the general setting is in the Pearl City area. You know that stretch of Kam Highway between Waimano Home Road and Leeward Community College? Imagine that whole stretch on the makai side of the highway as a row of houses, small stores, temples, and churches, all looking kind of like the houses in older parts of Makiki and Moiliili. You know what I mean: they have shake roofs and the eaves are curved downward like old Japanese architecture. All the way to LCC. For some reason, I walk past those houses on my way to LCC every day, and one day I strike up a conversation with a woman who’s making the same walk.
She’s Japanese and definitely younger than me by at least six or seven years, but not more than nine years younger. She’s got shoulder-length, straight black hair. She’s just a little heavier than she perhaps should be. Somehow, we really hit it off and take a detour to a nearby park, where we sit and talk. One of us produces (in the magical way that dreams often provide) a picnic blanket, and in a semi-private section of the park, we proceed to get busy. Not busy busy. I’m talking about first base. Well, rounding first base, but definitely not much further than a few steps past that. I can say this with some amount of confidence because (and I really never thought I’d be admitting this in this space) that’s as far as I go. Now, I know that in dreams we often go past where we go in real life (else what are dreams for, really?), but in this case, even while one of my hands is getting quite familiar with one of her thighs, part of my dream-brain is reminding me that okay, here’s the line and it’s time to rein this in.
Don’t judge me. I have a conservative line for a reason, and for the most part I don’t regret it.
Now I don’t know how this happens, but I am aware of another person’s presence on this picnic blanket. It’s another guy. And he’s somehow entwined with us but not really. I mean, I’m still the one kissing this girl, but he seems to be equally involved with her and I feel the need to compete with him for her attention. I figure that as long as I’ve got her attention, it doesn’t matter that there’s this other shirtless guy right there on the other side of her. I’m not getting any encouragement from her to rein it in, and I’m really enjoying that thigh, but then I whisper between long kisses, “You’re so pretty.” It’s like slamming on her brakes.
“What? No. Don’t say that,” she says. I sense it’s from some kind of lack of confidence, which is weird because she’s seemed pretty confident up to this point.
“No, really. You are. You’re so pretty,” I repeat. But the spell is broken.
She says, “I think we should get up.”
We get up. The other guy disappears. We rearrange ourselves (hair, shirts, glasses, you know what I mean) and as we continue our walk to LCC we share our stories. Where’d you go to high school; that kind of thing. The communication is better than I can remember with anyone except R, whose presence in this dream is mostly just my own memories, except near the very end. The thing is, I am communicating with this girl in a way that I didn’t think was possible for me anymore.
Now somehow we don’t make it to LCC. We find ourselves back at her house. We enter the house (I think it’s to get lunch) and the girl’s mom is there. And the girl’s mom is someone I know.
There’s this girl (in my real life, not in this dream, ‘though it’s also true in this dream) named Heidi who graduated the year after me. Her mom worked at the school (which I say partly so readers familiar with the players don’t confuse her with another Heidi in the same class) all the way up to just a couple of years after I started my teaching career at the same school. I once hired Heidi to work in the after-school program I ran. In fact, she was my last hire before I moved to Hilo to finish my undergraduate studies. While working there, Heidi got to know one of the guys, another person I recruited to work there, whom I’d dormed with. They got married and moved to Washington several years ago.
Well this girl in my dream introduces me to her mom, and it’s Heidi’s mom. She runs over and gives me a big hug and asks how I’m doing, and asks how it is I’m having lunch with her younger daughter, Heidi’s little sister.
In real life, Heidi doesn’t have a younger sister, as far as I know.
The next hour or so (in dream time; I of course have no way of knowing how long this is in real time) is spent getting reacquainted with Heidi’s family. The vibe is really good, because her family already knows and loves me and I feel very comfortable in this house with these people. I become aware at one point that I don’t know the girl’s name, but I figure that won’t be hard to figure out pretty soon. I’m uncomfortable about it, but not too worried.
Which is really interesting because (in real life) the only short story I’ve published so far (don’t bother looking it up; it wasn’t in one of the indexed journals) is a story about my meeting a girl on a bus and how just as I’m trying to figure out how to ask her name, we get interrupted by a fellow bus rider who looks toward us and starts cussing.
The girl and I have to get going to school (or whatever it is we do at LCC) and as we’re getting set to go, it becomes clear for some reason that I need to borrow a t-shirt. Someone in the house holds up a shirt for me to borrow, and it’s one of R’s shirts. R has somehow remained just a memory in this dream, but now here invades my dream in a much more concrete way. I think now that maybe it wasn’t R’s shirt; it could have been Heidi’s (there are a few shirts they would have had in common) but in the dream I’m certain it’s R’s shirt.
Something happens (I don’t remember what) and that shirt becomes unnecessary and the girl and I are about to head out the door and that’s when I wake up.
You know how it is with some dreams. The fact that they are dreams doesn’t change whatever they do to you. I feel like certain buttons were pushed and my being awake now doesn’t just unpush them. I woke up VERY sad that this was just a dream.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ry is on a train, rolling toward summer camp somewhere near Montana. His parents are on a boat, relaxing in the Caribbean. His grandfather is in Wisconsin, taking care of the house and dogs. They are all (Ry, parents, grandfather, and dogs) this far-flung at the beginning of As Easy as Falling off the Face of the Earth, but a combination of bad luck, bad decision-making, bad circumstances, and even bad geology flings them further and further apart as the novel progresses. In her first novel since the Newbery-winning Criss Cross, Lynne Rae Perkins creates a wonderfully absurd story that becomes more absurd with each page in prose that is inventive, engaging, and hilarious.
If you have read Criss Cross, you sort of know what to expect. The writing is very stream-of-consciousness in an adolescent way, but it is also extremely clever. There are times when Perkins audaciously breaks certain rules about good prose, but because she establishes early that this is the kind of story (and storytelling) where anything is likely to happen, she successfully pulls it off in ways not unlike her characters’ own daring stunts. The writer’s voice had me laughing aloud more frequently than even her own Criss Cross, as when Ry finds himself following orders aboard a small sailboat:
Ry was giddy at their unexpected luck. He understood that they were not done sailing, but tomorrow was another day. He would have kissed the boards of the pier if he weren’t so busy doing what Del was telling him to do. He haffed the chuffs, clipped the ridings, railed the boards, highed the lows, skibed the rampets, harbed the reefs, and cleeted the forths. Which is what sailing talk sounds like if you are not a sailor.
When they had made everything fast, which meant making sure nothing would go anywhere at all, fast or slow, Del said, “Here, grab your sweatshirt. It might cool down later.”
There is a section, a few pages later, that had me giggling (and I don’t giggle) when Perkins alters her narrator’s voice as Ry uses his high-school Spanish to communicate with an old lighthouse keeper. I would quote it here, but to remove it from context would be a disservice to anyone who might read the novel later.
I will agree with most reviewers who say this is not quite the novel Criss Cross is, but then I have read very few novels that are. This novel lacks the heart-breaking sympathy Perkins creates for her characters in the earlier book, but it cranks the whimsy up a few levels. Where Criss Cross is like a ride through the tunnel of love, As Easy as Falling off the Face of the Earth is more like a roller coaster ride, or like the wild, turbulent flight of a homemade airplane piloted by a crazy genius.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When scientists observe the first known death of a proton, only Will Tuppence and his best friend Mi-Su seem to understand the significance of such an event. For Will it means that nothing can be counted on, and that everything is impermanent, including him and whatever he leaves behind when he’s gone. As he struggles to come to terms with this thought, his world incomprehensibly and obliviously continues to move around him in ways predictable and not-so-predictable. His bratty younger sister continues to annoy him, only now she’s finding new ways of doing so. His friends Mi-Su and BT continue to be his friends, although perhaps not in the predictable way they always had been before. They even kiss each other in a moment Mi-Su says could not be helped and which Will is sure should have been his. Will, meanwhile, continues to try and give structure to a world that steadfastly refuses it.
Jerry Spinelli manages again to come up with something unique. The author’s voice here takes on a strange tone, one perhaps reminiscent of the writer’s voice in Eggs but without the weight that story’s narrative seemed to bear with its serious subject matter and its fragile, at-risk characters. Spinelli here sticks mostly to very short chapters, not numbered in strict sequence beginning at chapter one, but numbered according to the time that’s passed since the death of that first proton. Several chapters are not even a page in length, and a few are just one or two words. The result is a terrific, uneven pacing that seems to stop, start, glide, and turn like the skateboard Will refuses to let his sister ride. At times the reader is hurled from one episode to the next, while at others the reader seems to glide through long, smooth passages of dialogue.
Spinelli’s main character is not as likable as in some of his other work, and this might be where young readers find some difficulty in sticking with the book. Mi-Su is the supportive friend readers will like right away, but Will’s pettiness and inability to treat his sister with any kindness at all might turn some readers away. If they can stick with the story, however, they will find a kind of depth thoughtful readers will find rewarding.
I respected the way Spinelli handled the narrative in Eggs, a book that presents two characters in awful situations. In that story, the writer leaves it to the reader to understand what kind of changes his characters are going through. There seems to have been concern that readers might not get it, because there is an author’s Q-and-A section at the back of the book that attempts to help puzzled readers. However, in Smiles to Go, he seems to have caved in to the urge to put everything into words, letting his character summarize his feelings near the end of the story in a kind of After-School-Special, “and-this-is-what-I-learned” kind of way. One could argue that young readers need this kind of debriefing, but I am disappointed by this decision and think it cheapens what is otherwise a very well-written book.
