ever-fixed mark

I have lived in Massachusetts for eight years, which means I’m now coming up on the third presidential election since moving here.

Here in Port City, around election time, there’s always a bit of an awkward moment during social gatherings when someone brings up the subject of politics. Eventually, everyone lets on that they’re on the same page, politically speaking, and then we move on to talk happily about murdering babies, requiring kindergarteners to recite the Gay Agenda instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, and inviting the Muslims (all of whom are terrorists) to attack us repeatedly without fear of reprisal. You know, as we liberals are wont.

So I was curious…what about those of you who live in areas that are NOT so politically homogeneous, where blood runs both red and blue? Do you avoid political discussions altogether in mixed company? Do book club meetings and playgroups degenerate into political brawls? Something in between? Discuss.

Watching the convention coverage reminded me of one random brush with near-celebrity I’ve had in my life: In grad school, I took a seminar on Faulkner in which Jill Biden was a fellow student.

I wish there were something more to the story, but that’s about it. I believe she used her maiden name during the class, and then for some reason, the professor told us that she was Biden’s wife on the last day. This was before Anita Hill, before the plagiarism scandal, before the aneurysm; Biden was known but not yet notorious.

That seminar was memorable for me, though, because we had to present our papers orally–a little prep for the thesis defense toward which we were ostensibly headed–and it was the first time in my life that I actually enjoyed speaking in public. I was socially awkward and insecure in the extreme, but something about my paper topic lit my imagination, and I found myself eager to deliver it to the class. It was the first time I ever lectured rather than reading a prepared paper, and I really enjoyed the sensation of holding people’s interest with my words. That was the day I decided to become a teacher.

(Some day I’ll have to write a blog post about the day I decided to give up being a teacher. It involved a vice principal who told me I couldn’t fail a kid who had plagiarized a paper. And maybe he was right; we have a vice-presidential nominee who is a well-known plagiarist. And another who is a former beauty queen!)

After I left teaching, I continued to speak in public as part of my job. I am not a very polished speaker. I have an unpleasant, crackly voice and no rhetorical flourishes to speak of. Still, I get a lot of positive feedback on my presentations, and if I were to give advice to anyone nervous about public speaking, I would say that you’ll be a raging success if you do these two things: 1. Speak LOUDLY and 2. Have something interesting to say.

The first is easily, if rarely, done. (Amplification is irrelevant; when you speak loudly, miked or not, you sound interested in your topic, and if you sound interested, your audience will be more interested.) The second is considerably harder. Most presentations I hear are either too general or too specific for the audience. And even if you have the right level of detail, you have to arrange those details to create a narrative arc for your listeners. To do this, you have to edit ruthlessly. Personally, I tend to be too pedantic; I feel a responsibility to share every detail, when my listeners only care about the highlights.

In this country, we don’t emphasize oratory in our educational system, which is probably why as a nation we respond to it so readily. Think about it: it’s relatively rare to hear someone like Obama who can string two coherent thoughts together in public. He’s taken some flack for it, and I heard he even toned down his acceptance speech to mitigate concerns that he’s all style and no substance. But I’m looking forward to having a president who is a statesman. I think it would be terrific if we had something akin to the British tradition of having the Members of Parliament question the Prime Minister right there on the house floor, so he’s forced to give impromptu speeches on a regular basis.

Husband and I hate yard work so much that we took pains to buy one of the only houses in town without a lawn. Even so, there is still a troublesome border sprouting weeds along three sides of the house. Once a year, my mother pulls all the weeds and puts mulch down, but they always grow back. She must be doing it wrong.

This year, a rather purposeful-looking plant sprouted right next to the back door. “Weed or not?” I wondered, and then one day it threw up a large, pretty yellow flower. My parents cleaned out the border to give it some room to grow, put down more mulch, and then put up some edging so we would stop treading on it. Other plants of the same type took root and fluorished, but we still had no idea what it was.

One day our babysitter was dropping off the boys and exclaimed, “You’re growing pumpkins? How did you get them to take? Mine have never turned out so well.”

Pumpkins?!

Rewind to Halloween, when like most of our neighbors we (nominally) decorated our doorstops with pumpkins. Unlike most of our neighbors, though, we pretty much let the pumpkins sit out and rot until it snowed and we didn’t have to think about them anymore. The seeds must have dropped into the soil, and then Nature took its course.

There are some benefits to sloth.

Last week at work, I unexpectedly won two tickets to the Bruce Springsteen concert. I haven’t been moved to buy tickets to see Springsteen since 1988, when I saw him as part of the line-up in the Amnesty International “Human Rights Now” tour in Philly. But I like Bruce — who doesn’t? — and maybe it was the “unexpected” part, or the “free” part, but I was unaccountably excited to see the show. He did not disappoint.

The Boss holds a special place in the lore of the small liberal-arts college where I did my undergrad. In 1974, before he made it big, he played our dining hall. Lord knows what he thought of the handful of preppy clones from the Land that F.M. Radio Forgot who turned out to see him. Bruce’s subsequent fame, of course, ensured that they never forgot him and guaranteed them a sure-fire cocktail-party story for years to come.

That was before my time. My college cohort also has a concert story, but one that lives in infamy. When I was a junior, the concert committee booked Stevie Ray Vaughan to play the spring festival, but they had to cancel him when the student body purchased only eight tickets. (I wasn’t one of them; I had neither the musical chops nor the $40 to spare.) Thus, we missed the opportunity to see one of the greatest rock guitarists before his death.

I recently read a review of a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It’s like one of those “100 best” lists on steroids. Typically, I will have read a respectable percentage of books on most lists (English major, no social life as a teenager, lived in North Africa with no TV for three years = lots of reading time). But I hadn’t read most of (nor even heard of some of) the books named in the review.

Then I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a list that didn’t inspire either misplaced pride or self-loathing? How about a list of just really satisfying reads? I decided to compile one. It’s completely idiosyncratic, reflecting my taste only. There’s not a “should” or a “must” on this list. If on your deathbed you realize you haven’t read a one of these, you have my permission to die happy nonetheless.

My criteria for a satisfying reading experience are people (memorable characters); place (evocative setting); and plot (a good, chewy, complicated, surprising, yet grounded-in-reality story line). Here, in alphabetical order, are my top ten:

Charlotte Brontë, Villette. I’ve never met anyone who likes Villette as much as I do, and I haven’t met very many people who have liked it at all. There’s something about this novel, though, that tugs at my heartstrings. Lucy is one of the few examples in nineteenth-century literature of a truly independent woman who comes and goes as she pleases. She and Paul are both quirky characters, like no one I’ve ever met in real life, yet I have no problem believing that they could be real people. And I just love how Brontë takes the story down a fairly traditional path for the first half, and you’re pretty sure you know exactly where she’s going, and then Bam! left turn.

Robertson Davies, The Cornish Trilogy. This series by the renowned Canadian author — The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus — is artsy (dealing with writers, painters, and musicians, respectively), juicy, and meaty. Thanks to Davies, I knew who Paracelsus was when I applied for a job at a company named after him (hint: feces is involved). And, bonus: According to Wikipedia, “Davies is one of the authors mentioned in the Moxy Früvous song ‘My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors.’”

Charles Dickens, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Both of these books are great in the same way, so I couldn’t choose one. They both have memorable characters and a plot you could get lost in for days. I’m tempted to give the edge to Bleak House, but that may be because I enjoyed the BBC adaptation so much. (Check it out: Scully is amazing as Lady Dedlock, and Mr. Guppy is not to be believed).

Louise FitzHugh, Harriet the Spy. Never gets old; feels like it was written yesterday, especially since Harriet’s journal is kind of a proto-blog. As someone who wants to be a writer when I grow up, but only manages to record gossip about my surroundings, I still identify with Harriet.

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. I read this in college for a class Brit Lit, fell instantly under its spell, and have fallen in love again on every re-reading, although I can’t really put my finger on why. It’s a great example of an unreliable narrator, and also is one of those books that makes you wonder how the British maintained their empire for so long.

E.M. Forster, Howards End. Every person in this book seems like someone I wouldn’t like in real life, and yet I love them all. That’s kind of the point of the book; that our life’s work is “only to connect” with others, and that if we try hard enough we can connect across class, across politics — even across artistic sensibilities, or lack of them.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters. This is one of Gaskell’s less melodramatic, more bittersweetly realistic stories. You’ll come for the romance but you’ll stay for the characterizations. Her depiction of a blended family, neither blissfully happy nor utterly miserable, is a highlight.

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure. Jude stands out on this list as one of the few without a happy ending, but I’ve always liked Hardy, and something about Jude’s aspirations to the university gripped me. I may have been overly influenced by the movie adaptation with Kate Winslet as Sue Bridehead (another independent female, at least for a while).

Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet. This set of books was the basis for the “Jewel in the Crown” BBC miniseries. I read the books back in college, saw the miniseries recently, and then re-read the books. The kernel of the story is the rape of an Englishwoman in in India during World War II. Over four volumes, Scott returns to this story again and again, exploring it from different angles, adding details from different viewpoints, and weaving in other stories as well. His point of view is mostly English, but his sympathies are more balanced than in a lot of colonial lit.

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. This is a fairy tale that is completely grounded in reality. I somehow missed it when I was sixteen, but it was just as good when I caught up with it in my thirties. The setting is especially magical. Smith also wrote 101 Dalmatians, a book I also loved as a child.

Anthony Trollope, the Palliser novels. It took me a long while to get to Trollope. I was underwhelmed by the Barsetshire chronicles in college, and then read Phineas Finn when I was in the Peace Corps and thought there could not be a duller subject for a novel than Parliament. Trollope impressed me as one of those quiet, “domestic” novelists. A few years ago, though, I caught the BBC adaptation of The Way We Live Now on TV and saw how wickedly sharp he could be. I consequently picked up The Eustace Diamonds and really admired how Trollope made avaricious Lizzy sort of sympathetic during the marvelous hunting scenes. Then I read all six pretty much non-stop, even Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux. The day I put the last one down was a solemn day in my life.

Connie Willis, Doomsday Book. Willis is a sci-fi writer who has written two time-travel novels: this one, and the considerably lighter To Say Nothing of the Dog. Doomsday Book is set in future England (where, as Husband is fond of pointing out, they’ve invented time travel but still can get a busy signal when they place a “trunk call”) and in England during the Plague. I found it entertaining on so many levels — as a historical novel, as a mystery, and as traditional sci-fi. It really brought the Black Death, uh, alive for me.

What’s on your “most satisfying” list?

Friday was yet another opportunity for Husband and me to celebrate our triskadekaversary. We lined up a (free) babysitter (thank you, C! Thank you!), but I wasn’t in the mood to go out for a formal dinner. I told Husband that the one child-free experience I was really craving was an hour on the lake in my kayak. Husband doesn’t kayak, but I promised him an hour lakefront with a book and a beer, unmolested by infant demands. He agreed, and we bought a six-pack of Hefeweizen and tied up the kayak.

When we got to the lake, though, we discovered we had forgotten the bottle opener. “We’ll figure something out, right?” I said.

“I might, but you’re going to be in the middle of the lake,” Husband pointed out.

I put a beer in my boat anyway.

The weather was perfect — sunny, warm, not too windy, but not too still and buggy, either. After about half an hour of paddling I started thinking about that beer. I examined the cap, thinking maybe it was a twist-off after all, but no such luck. The bottle cap even bore the words, “Use Bottle Opener,” no doubt to forestall lawsuits brought by plaintiffs like myself who found themselves without a churchkey.

I did have a regular key, though, and I tried to use it to pry the cap off. There was a little hissing sound of air escaping from the bottle, but I made no real progress. By now I was really thirsty and beginning to feel that my pride was at stake. It was a pretty sad state of affairs if, after three years in the Peace Corps, I couldn’t open a simple beer bottle without aid of modern technology. Really, I might as well hang up my Birkenstocks.

What would MacGyver do?

I surveyed the equipment at hand: Key. Child’s lunch box. Sigg water bottle. Volume 4 of The Raj Quartet. Hair band. Thousands of gallons of water. And…kayak.

The kayak has a lip around the cockpit coaming that is used to attach a spray skirt. I positioned the bottle with the cap under the lip and cracked it down. There was a gentle “poof” and then the cap came right off. I lost some beer due to the fact that the bottle was almost upside down when it opened, but other than that it worked like a charm. It was the best beer I’d ever had.

When I got back to shore, Husband had also managed to open his beer, but there was blood and broken glass involved. Score one for Peace Corps ingenuity.

The lease on one of our cars recently expired. Car shopping has never been my favorite activity, and my experience this round did nothing to endear me further to the sport. In the end, I didn’t get the car I set out to buy, and I paid too much for it, too. It wasn’t even like I was wowed by some slick salesperson; I was just too impatient to walk away when they refused to lower the price any more.

After the dealership screwed up the paperwork, forcing Husband to spend a full day at the insurance company and RMV to straighten it out, I was in an evil humor when I picked up the car. I almost blew a gasket when they made me wait while they regenerated the contract — then they had my address wrong so they had to do it again. By the time the sales guy was ready to give me the grand tour of my new wheels, I just grabbed the keys and drove away.

On the way home, I started warming up to the car. It is the same make as my old one, but despite being two models lower on the food chain, it actually feels more spacious, peppier, and easier to drive.

I was experimenting with the various controls, and I saw one I didn’t recognize. “What’s this?” I thought, and pushed it. The radio cut out, and a voice said, “At the beep, say a command.” The stereo display read, “Telephone.”

It took me a little while to catch on, but it turns out it’s an integrated Bluetooth-enabled hands-free phone system that works perfectly with my new Blackberry. It allows me to dial by voice command and hear conversations through the car radio. I have a talking car!

I know this is hardly new technology, but can I tell you how cool it is to hear someone’s voice coming through six speakers while I drive, without having to lift a finger? It’s exactly like “My Mother the Car.”

I have been experiencing the weirdest sensation, something like, I don’t know, a taste hallucination. I keep imagining that I am tasting something distinctive, even though I’m not eating anything. Most of the time it has been this black truffle cheese, but a few times it was asparagus and once, oddly, a flavor of Baskin-Robbins ice cream (cherry cheesecake) that I used to favor when I was a kid, which I now (having “tasted” it as an adult) realize was disgusting.

Am I having some untoward neurological event? (Dr. Google says yes.) Does this sound like the run-up to a Very Special Episode of “House”? (Although if it were “House,” and I were complaining about strange symptoms, the person next to me would probably go into renal failure, and I’d never be heard from again.)

Speaking of “House”…nothing quite announces, “This show has jumped the shark” like a doctor show in which the regular doctors are suddenly the patients of the week. Same thing with a cop show where the cops are suspected of murder, a lawyer show where the lawyers start taking the stand, etc. TV writers, you were sitting around marinating in your creative juices for the whole writers’ strike, and this is the best you can do?

Yet another book that the George W. Bush Presidential Library will have to forego, thanks to my efforts.

This week was a squeaker, though. I was eating less than I thought humanly possible, but the pounds just weren’t dropping. I think my habit of eating dinner late has been working against me, so I made an effort to eat earlier and cut down on the sodium the last two days. That’s one change I find it difficult to make. We really like having our dinner in peace after the boys go to bed, when we can enjoy it. Now that I’m commuting to work and eating my other two meals in meetings, I hate to give up the single relaxed meal of the day.

My intention to leave my job with a modicum of dignity and minimum of recriminations has been derailed by a Series of Unfortunate Events. They range from the mildly irritating (they took me out to lunch and stuck ME with the tab!) to the borderline criminal (my check has gone astray for the fourth month in a row). But for some strange reason, the thing that sticks in my craw is that they’re intercepting and reading my e-mail.

How did I discover this? No, it was not a case of cyber detective work, a la The Cuckoo’s Egg. (Did you ever read that? I think that’s when I realized I was a Geek in Embryo.) I sit on an industry committee, and the chair sent me an e-mail invitation to the next teleconference, accidentally using my old work e-mail as well as the personal e-mail I had asked her to use. One of my former colleagues read it and then forwarded it back to me, directing me to tell her that he would sit on this committee in my place.

I know that corporations are typically authorized to monitor Internet traffic and read corporate e-mail, although I’m not certain that applies to my situation, as I was not a regular employee and our company never stated any such policy. I have never heard of an e-mail account being kept open after termination, though. Husband says that in the past he has been asked to handle messages for a departed employee, but in my experience the account is closed and a bounce-back message directs the sender to contact another person.

What irks me the most it that my colleague thought it was appropriate to usurp my position on the committee. I explained as politely as I could that it doesn’t work that way; the committee invited me to join, not a random representative from Company X, and my place is not entailed on Company X in as if it were a piece of property in nineteenth-century England.

I hope they are having fun reading all the e-mails that the dog-walking group, Consumer Reports, and the Mothers’ Club are still mistakenly sending to my old work address. If my colleague wants to take my spot on the Playgroup Committee, he’s welcome to it.