gooey and determined
ON SECOND THOUGHT
Although it is maybe not the greatest attitude in terms of my personal safety, I have a really hard time taking little baby teenage gangstas seriously. There was one of these on the train yesterday, and he was listening to some loud music on his phone: no headphones or anything like that, just treating his cellular telephone like his own personal shitty boombox. I was reading my book and looking up a lot to stare at him, partly because it was LOUD AS HELL and partly because I wanted him to feel the Full Force Of My Disapproval. He noticed.
Little Baby Teenage Gangsta: What are you looking at, bitch?
Me [in the mildest of tones]: That’s really loud.
LBTG [which I just realized is an anagram for “LGBT,” although I have no clue as to this young man’s orientation]: Fuck you. Fuck you, stupid bitch. I’m gonna slap the shit out of you. We get off this train, I’m gonna fuck you up.
Me [still mild like Mr. Rogers]: Oh baloney, you will not. [continues reading]
The funny thing here is how he just…left it at that. I think dude must have a lot of conflict in his everyday interactions, and was not used to someone (me) not escalating.
THINGS I WILL ALWAYS READ
- Heroin memoirs. I like drug memoirs in general (although I will cop to getting bored when the protagonists get clean), but heroin especially.
- Books about North Korea. I have a huge North Korea obsession, for some reason.
- Literary wanker fiction. This is hard to explain, but just look for something reviewed in the NYT that drops names like Franzen, DeLillo, Lorrie Moore, Murakami, Shteyngart, Markson, etc.
- Books about the whaling industry in the 19th century. (I also recommend this whaling documentary from PBS.)
- Ancient Rome. Despite having managed to get through an entire Classics major focusing only on Greek and ignoring Latin, I really like reading about Rome.
- Vegetarian propaganda/factory-farm horror stories.
- Funny books. If you ask me there is a real lack of funny in fiction today. Notable exceptions include Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land (the funniest book of the ‘00s, if you ask me), the aforementioned Shteyngart, and George Saunders. For nonfiction/memoir, try Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson: pure genius.
THINGS I WILL NEVER READ
- Any book with a map of an imaginary place in the front cover.
- A certain kind of book with a softer-focus picture of the back of some woman’s head, or a picture of a lovely country house, or female feet (I KNOW). Many of these books indicate that they have been endorsed by some morning talk show and have book-club “discussion questions” in the back. And they are not universally terrible, but you know what you’re going to get with them, and it is not usually something I want.
- Tolkien. Never have read a word of him and probably never will. Orcs and elves and made-up words and there are no women in this book and seriously, my eyes just glaze over. Snore.
- Most contemporary “mommy memoirs,” the majority of which are just stuffed full of never-acknowledged privilege and an annoying tone of WOW I’M HAVING A BABY NO ONE ELSE HAS EVER DONE THAT EVER. Titles may reference sippy cups, amazement at how this happened, drinking (or other hip, “I’m still cool” touchstones), lack of sleep, etc.
- I don’t care for vampires. I do kind of like zombies, though.
- Although I do like funny books, I hate the words “rollicking” and “romp.” Prose does not romp; only dogs romp. These back-cover-blurb words are an instant turn-off. Pro bookgeek tip: if you really want to read something, don’t read the blurbs, because they manage to make even the best book sound terrible.
- Books that are authored by Pompous Stupidhead, PhD. Notice how real academics don’t use “PhD” on their books, even though they have one? Adding “PhD” is only for self-help wankers.
FARMER FAILURE
My zucchini plants grew like crazy. Cracked-out bananaface crazy. Tons of flowers, irritating prickly leaves spread out all over the gangway (I have had to get busy with the hedge clippers several times this summer, in order to keep a path clear for taking the garbage out to the alley). Despite all this dense jungle vegetation, we have surprisingly few zucchini. We have had some small ones, which were tasty, but they just do not get very big before turning yellow or rotting from the flower end down.
I am not relying on the zucchini harvest to feed my family or anything, but the disconnect between insane amount of foliage/puny amount of actual food has been a bit disappointing. I poked around online and found that the low yield and the “blossom end rot”—which sounds like a delicate Victorian way of describing something shameful and feminine—could be caused by a lack of calcium in the soil. Really? I was game for throwing some seeds in the ground, weeding and watering was kind of fun (and fashionable—I had gloves and a sun had and everything), but I don’t know about monitoring mineral levels. That is a whole other level of gardening, man.
—mimi smartypants of the not much squash.