Last of the Summer Sniffles
I have the unfortunate luck to be getting an attack of the summer sniffles. This is only mildly tolerable due to the fact that I am barely finished with two of the three courses I had for summer quarter, and therefore have a lighter workload. It isn’t really all that tolerable at all, as I hate being sick (really sick) with a passion. Especially colds because they start the same and then end up as pneumonia or bronchitis or laryngitis which all sound like pretty things to say, but their realities are not nearly as fun as saying them.
I just finished a book– a real one, not a non-fiction account of what it is like to teach, as a white person, in an all minority inner city school where you are not being lauded as the great white hope but instead laughed at for thinking you can be something as silly as the great white hope. Reading it was refreshing. Unfortunately, the writer had a style of writing that was extremely verbose and kind of crawled around in my brain and nestled there so I am going to stop writing now, less I start to make sure that everything is “exquisitely annotated, and, where possible, provide staggering visual aids” (Pessl 11). And in MLA format, no less.
The book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was a very entertaining read. However, to whoever claimed that it was part travelogue– have you ever read a travelogue? A casual mentioning of “Rhoda Harris, Galways, Indianna” followed by “Nondescript Redhead, Our Town, USA” is not, nor will it ever be a travelogue. Sadly, yes this was why I picked the book up– also because the amazon blurb said something about being packed to the gills with pop-culture and literary references. I give it a smile, nod, and my patented “I liked it, it was good” pin.
–all I am working on is the knitted converse shoes and trying to figure out which yarn I will use for Giselle.