I've got a case of the Mondays

I'm not entirely certain what that would have meant in a pre-industrialized world. However, I'm fairly certain that it is widely accepted as now connoting a pretty crappy day that is coupled with some minor fear that the better part of a person's life is being spent doing something that they don't actually want to be doing.

After working diligently in the yard on Saturday I was rewarded with my third case of poison ivy within the last 15 months. The last bout, which I chronicled in this blog, left me looking like an orc from Lord of the Rings. Vanity laid low. This time, the offending plant has merely left its crude marks upon my arms. However, I've grown tired of wanting to rip into the skin of my arms and scratch them down to the bone. My desire to raise up a beautiful English garden from our plot of grass and weeds has diminished rapidly, with the knowledge that I'll be fighting poison ivy as well. Sadly, it is not the sexy poison ivy of Batman fame, with whom, despite my great reservations, I would be willing to do battle with.


In other house related news our washer has decided that the spin cycle is immaterial in the washing process. We tend to disagree, as you must pull your sopping weight clothes (I mean S, not we) from the washer and wash them by hand. We've tried to explain to the washer that its new method is not up our alley but to no avail. Inanimate objects are rarely as intelligent as you'd like them to be. Though, in truth, nor are humans.

S: What haven't we had go wrong in this house?
M: I'm sure it will find something.

The long and the short of this new mess of problems is that I need to procure a vast amount of money quickly. And I can only think of one honorable way to do that. The time has come for me to write a jazzy book about some random topic. "The Earth is Flat." "The Tipping Point." "Blink." "Why atheists need to write long tracts to other people about being atheists." I think the world needs another book about something vaguely scientific, written in the NPR style. I'm now just going to go ahead and call for suggestions. Though I'm considering just forming an amalgamation of the most popular literary reforms. Perhaps a romance, with all sorts of clues about Jesus being a woman that takes place during a time of economic disaster due to a water shortage. Eventually the two people fall in love and their clothes fall off. Also, they stop people from overusing water and hating freedom, and China, something about the rise of China. Would you read this book? Damn right you would!

Just finished A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

I'm inclined to disagree with the NYT assessment of this book as one of the best five works of fiction this year. The book is definitely worthy of praise, particularly the first third. However, after a while the stories take on a vague sameness, and it is only in the final story that you start to feel as if threads are being woven together. I'm certain that the book was hailed as brilliant for being able to depict women so accurately at various points in history. The gist is to cover about 130 years in the lineage of one family, focus on the women, starting with the matriarch who starved herself to death to draw attention to the womens suffrage movement. However, I felt Walbert lost her way a bit when she ventured into the modern world. Though, as I think about it, the final two stories do it quite well. Perhaps it's just pretty damn hard to read a trapped woman after seeing how well Woolf does it. Again, this book is quite good. My one caveat is that the sameness of the narrator, made the women blend together a bit, in a way that was unintended as the lives they lived were quite different as time passed.

Kate Walbert A short History of Women

She watches him leaving out the window, latch locked, the watchdog fast asleep on her bed in the other room. He limps a bit, though she knows he'll be fine. He is a tall man, William, and from here, in the moonlight that has suddenly appeared out of nowhere, he seems taller, his shadow falling back to her. There is something defined in this, in the manner of his leaving, so that when she turns to find Hilde waiting, Dorothy is not surprised. Hilde sits in the corner of the room, just behind the piano, her face bruised, her nightgown loose. She smiles and fades into the pattern of the wallpaper, twisting vines and leaves too large and somewhere, here or there, a parrot.
"I see they've stuck ladies in darkest of Africa," William had said upon that first visit. God but he was handsome then.

Fiction by me (Continued)

At this point, we were feeling the acute camaraderie commonly shared in excessive drink. Julie was bent at the railing in a posture of supplication. She had her fingers wrapped around the vertical bars as if they were prayer beads, and she dipped her neck between the rails. She then commenced vomiting riotously on the sidewalk below.

We were on the sixth floor. Anyhow, apparently as we debated the role of the feminine in the development of a benign afterlife, Julie’s vomit hurtled towards the sidewalk like some ungodly waterfall when two unsuspecting young men stepped into its path. Of course, she had no intent to strike them. They were innocent bystanders. The two young gentlemen, understand that I use the term quite loosely, with barely digested pinot noir on their shoulders, did not have time to consider that their shower had been an unfortunate fallout born of necessity, a Calvinist’s God’s whim. And thus, I presume, regarded the angel bowed in prayer above them not as a beneficent deity or intercessor, but as an object for disparagement.

Confabulation is characterized by a spontaneous pouring out of irrelevant associations, sometimes bizarre ideas, which may be held with firm conviction. For instance, what if I pretended this whole time that you were something that you are not?