What are you doing, 'col?

Well, I'm doing laundry, which hardly bears mentioning, since I'm always doing laundry. Unless I've given up on the laundry, in which case spook is doing it. This morning he said that he had put in all the laundry last night, and I thought no way, and then I discovered that all the laundry did not include the two sets of sheets and mattress pad that have been waiting to be washed, oh, since Jacob was born. I don't want to diminish his achievement; there was a lot of damn washing to do. He also washed all of the bottles and all of the breastpump paraphernalia, no minor feat. So today I'm trying to get through the aforementioned sheets, and to assemble all the diapers and put them away. For ten seconds we could have clean diapers.

Can we talk about cloth diapers for a second? They are not nearly the nightmare that I was afraid they would be. When I told Adam about it, he said "You're doing all that folding?" Incredulous, wide-eyed. I know there are people who do all that folding and think nothing of it, but I am not of that tribe. No, in fact, we bought the BumGenius diapers (I am embarrassed just typing that), a diaper described to us (more embarrassment coming up) as "the Cadillac of diapers." No lie. These are pretty awesome, and totally straightforward, a big plus for me since when the Diaper Lady was demonstrating prefolds for us, I realized that I would need a degree in engineering just to understand how the damn thing was supposed to go together. The other big factors in the ease of our cloth diaper experience are:

1) Flushable liners. You wouldn't think this would matter much at the infant poop stage, but they cut down on the rinsing.
2) A spray head for our laundry sink tap. Thank you, Jenny. Before this I could not get the water pressure high enough and had to scrape poop out of the diapers by hand. (Ew. I know. But babies are gross, so stay with me.)
3) Laundry in our apartment. I cannot stress this enough.

The other thing I've been doing lately is reading a lot about food. I just finished Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. He says in the introduction that he wrote it after The Omnivore's Dilemma was published partly in response to the reader questions he received: now that you've done all this research about food production, what do you think we should eat? What do you eat? So it's two parts critique of the way nutrition science filters into the public imagination and one part his guidelines about what he thinks makes sensible eating. His ideas feel possible to adopt, unlike the dogmatic and rigid thinking which makes up so much of food discourse. Instead of feeling squashed by impossible standards, I came off the end of this book feeling inspired to change our food habits--both shopping and eating.

Et tu, Brute?

I've been reading novels set in the Roman Empire (one series concerning the rise of Julius Caesar, another set much later in Roman Britain), so I thought I'd borrow some nonfiction from the library. It seems, however, that all I care about is looking at Roman art and reading about the structure of the military.

Also that it is a good thing I developed this quirk now and not five months ago, because I would totally have tried to talk spook into naming the shrimpbaby Gaius.

Anyone have any good military history to recommend?

oh, now that's just embarrassing

In a time of economic uncertainty, you know what a really great idea is? Doing something so stupid that you piss off half your customer base.

Amazon, massive online book retailer, has removed a whole whack of titles from their sales rankings because of "adult content." In many cases, this means those books don't show up in a search of the Amazon site, either. One wonders how Amazon plans to sell these phantom books. One also wonders how Amazon defines adult content. The answer? "As poorly as everyone else who's ever tried it." In one of the more ridiculous examples, Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (complete with horrific serial killings) still shows up, but Unfriendly Fire, a book about queers and American military policy, is apparently too racy for us.

Books with queer content are disproportionately represented (or unrepresented, I guess) in this new system, regardless of whether that content consists of frolicsome fisting threeways or the mere mention of our existence. Also missing in action are romance and erotica titles (though which ones appears to be a crapshoot), and I'm sure there's more.

The internets are already ablaze with fury, and I think some fury is warranted. But you know what else is warranted? Hysterical laughter. Seriously, Amazon? Seriously? What were you thinking?

I'm with the Smart Bitches on this one. I say we Google Bomb them. Click for a new definition:

Amazon Rank

ETA: Apparently Amazon is now claiming that it's a glitch and not a new policy. And you know, if they had offered this as the first explanation, I'd've been willing to believe it, because the alternative is just so mindbogglingly dumb. But here are a couple of points to consider.

kooky adaptation? or kookiest adaptation?

So...assuming that you don't live under a rock, you may have heard about the book He's Just Not That Into You. Working in a bookstore, it was impossible to avoid. The authors made multiple appearances on Oprah. People swarmed the store. After much, much head-shaking, I caved and read it.

And you know what? It was pretty good. I was expecting to find it condescending and awful, poking fun at women for the bad behavior of men, and in fact the whole thing reads like this: "You are an awesome lady. This thing that your crush is doing? This is an asshole thing. Do not waste any more of your awesome lady time on this asshole. Out there is someone who wants to treat you like the queen that you are. I hear that you like this guy and would like to make excuses for his assholery, but seriously, best case scenario, what's that going to get you? A half-hearted relationship with an asshole. Run, don't walk." Um. Loosely paraphrasing.

I would like to go back in time and give my 17-year-old self a copy of this book. Hell, I would recommend this book to women my own age now. And while I think it's depressing that there are so many women who have lowered their expectations into nothingness that this book could become a runaway best-seller, I think it's maybe heartening that it did.

All that said, I have vocally expressed the opinion that a self-help book is not a good basis for a feature film, even though a large number of people with enough money to make it happen disagree. But I may be proven wrong yet again, if this is anything to go by:

ICYMI - 10 Chick Flick Cliches That Are Not In "He's Just Not That Into You" @ Yahoo! Video

ZOMG, THIS DUDE HAS A NAME

...and it is Nathan Kamp. Okay, okay, I suppose if I had thought about it, I would have realized that of course he has a name--but it's so surreal to think of him as having a life outside of the cover of oh, every romance novel published for the last five years, that it never occurred to me. And now I'm weirded out.

For those of you who haven't seen him, wander this way for a refresher. I think I see this guy's face more often than the faces of my dearest friends. I'm going to go and have a little lie down now.

endurance training

One thing that children require: stamina. Today I read Dennis Lee's poem "Alligator Pie" nine times in a row. When Lucy said "More!" (or more accurately, "Muh!") for what seemed like the zillionth time I resolved to teach her to say "Again!" and so that was the lesson for the afternoon. Along with repeating "Can you say 'please'?" over and over, to be rewarded with her little voice piping "Peez!"

Oh, I love her. I love her so much.

So that was my today, Lu's head pressed hard against my breastbone as she leaned back into my lap while I read stories and picked out important words when she got impatient and turned the pages really fast and repeated and repeated and repeated.

p.s. "Eg!" Success? You decide.

"Who? What? Who?" "All excellent questions."

If you don't know who Jodi Picoult is, this image is not causing your brain to short-circuit the way it did mine. Let me remedy the situation with brief plot synopses from some of her novels:

Change of Heart is about a man on death row who discovers that the living daughter of his victim needs a heart transplant, and decides to offer his.

The Pact is about two families trying to cope with the tragic aftermath of their teenage kids' suicide pact.

My Sister's Keeper is about a young girl who was conceived as a bone marrow donor for her sister, who is battling leukemia, and the decisions she makes after years of hospitalizations and surgeries to control her own body.

I could go on, but I think you're getting the gist. It's like discovering that Nicholas Sparks had been tapped to write a series of Spider-man comics.

Books rule!

...as does this excellent video about reading.

best thing I found on the internets today

"Chick Lit isn’t just shoes and weight loss any more than romance is about adverbs and rape." - SB Sarah, Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books.

Marry me, Sarah.

"I want more options!" "Don't we all?"

Random dude: "I'm looking for Neil Strauss."
Me: "Oh. The Game." [stands up, brushes dust off pantlegs, heads in direction of book]
RD: "You know it."
Me: "Yep."
RD: "Does it work on you?"
Me: "Lemme see: sad men trying to make a connection with women and sabotaging themselves because they chose manipulation as their opening gambit?" [two beats] "No."
RD: "Come on, you can't lie to a woman, I mean, if she falls for it..."
Me: [rounding on the dude with that smile that's more like showing my teeth] "Let me ask you this: if you lie to a woman and she believes you, who exactly is at fault there?"
RD: "You can go away now."
Me: [customer service smile] "Have a nice afternoon!"

There was a much less amusing story featured in one of our local weeklies about pickup artists (or, as they're apparently called, PUAs--pwahs?--am I the only person who thinks that acronym should be avoided at all costs?) and the pickup scene, which is apparently big in my city. Huh. For the record, I am not against the notion of picking up, or the idea of casual sex. All I ask is that all parties give informed consent, (which, duh, means that you can't lie to each other about what you're looking for out of the experience) and that everybody tries to make sure that everybody else is having a good time. If that seems like an unreasonably stringent standard to you, then don't bother commenting, because we have nothing to say to each other.

(I'm not going to link to the article, because frankly I don't have time or energy to handle the trolls and all the tedious, tedious things I know they'd call me, but if you would like to throw up in your mouth a little, you can find it by googling "pickup artist" along with "worship the cock." Yeah.)

One of the discussions we had at my place about it was about whether the author had a responsibility to frame the discussion a bit more around the guy she was profiling. My opinion on the subject is that while there's a valid critique about whether you want to give this man a lot of airtime, framing the discussion would have been a mistake, because it implies that there's a discussion to be had. There isn't. Not with this guy. Because he fucking hates women. There's no discussion possible with that level of pathology. The guys you want to discuss with, they're the guys who end up in pickup workshops because they'd just like to meet girls. Maybe for a long-term relationship, maybe for sex. I think there's a hole in the culture where we could be talking about the challenges that men face in meeting women, and an article about that and where/whether the pickup wave falls into that would be...interesting.

Based solely on a short trip down the relationship aisle in the bookstore I can tell you--newsflash--that folks looking for love, sex, and romance have no clue how to go about it. Well, there's no shame in that. Our culture, gender roles, and expectations continue to evolve, and they're damn confusing. I long, however, for strategies which are less depressing; for every book about how to have sex with women you met in bars by being an asshole, there's at least one about how to get some guy (apparently, any guy will do,) to marry you. Also by being an asshole. The Mystery Method, meet The Rules. You totally deserve each other.

Time Traveller's Wife: the gateway drug

It is possible that I have not had my genre-fiction bitch here at the blog. There are all kinds of erudite things I could say about genre snobbery, but at the moment I'm stuck at my first point of reference, which is: if you say to me "Oh, I don't read fantasy," in a voice dripping with contempt, right after you've finished telling me how much you loved Gregory Maguire's Wicked, a novel based on the freaking Wizard of Oz, you richly deserve the dressing-down you'll be getting in the staff room later on.

Luckily, I've been following not one but several spirited discussions about how genre fiction is denigrated by folks who don't read the genre in a variety of sexist, class-based ways. So if you're interested in losing a whole afternoon learning the intracacies of these arguments: what they said.
*

I've been thinking about whether there is a non-snarky way to address this in my job, say, with a clever display. There's got to be some way for me to say "Look, I'm not saying that if you loved the Time Traveller's Wife you're going to love a book with dragons in it. But you might enjoy some other well-written time travel fiction. What do you say you give it a whirl?" Um, in fifty words or less, on a placard.

Any ideas for books I should be linking up? I'll take suggestions in mystery, romance, sci-fi/fantasy, and pretty much anything else you can think of. The thing I'm the weakest on is what literary fiction works I could be using as examples. It just--more things to like in the world, you know? That's got to be a good thing.

*I freely admit that only a tiny bit of the Robin McKinley discussion is about genre, but it ranges freely into people's book prejudices, and I adore Robin McKinley, so any chance to direct people to her is a chance I'll take.

"It's my job to make sure you don't grow up stupid, Tim. It's bad for the world."

This post is links-a-go-go, I know, but they're all worth clicking. I swear.

Remember my complaining about Cassie Edwards? Cassie Edwards, star perpetrator of racist tropes in romance novels such as Savage Arrow, Savage Darkness, Savage Paradise, Savage Lies, Savage Wrongs, Savage Touch, Savage Glory, Savage Wind, Savage Storm, Savage Wonder, Savage Obsession, Savage Innocence, Savage Promise, Savage Quest and Savage Haircut*? You may or may not have heard around the blogosphere that she's embroiled in a plagiarism controversy. To wit: she plagiarized. Does the romance-reading public care? Will her publisher do anything about it? Did she actually write the incredibly poor defense of her work published on MySpace, or did she have to rip that off too?

You can read the whole story on the Smart Bitches website (a must-visit in any case), and I also encourage you to check out this story from one of the writers whose work she stole. Because ferrets + hot sex = meh?





*I regret to inform you that the last title is the only one I made up.

NO SPOILERS, I promise

Just finished the last Harry Potter book. I liked it. Please don't post spoilers in the comments here, either, out of courtesy to the folks who haven't finished reading.

I feel strangely listless now. Dunno why exactly. I think some of it is the experience of knowing something is truly over. Don't get me wrong--I like it when creative endeavours have an ending. Otherwise they tend to just blunder on until they're crushed under their own weight (see, for example, the books of Laurell K. Hamilton, the poor thing). I'm glad that J.K. Rowling decided that she would write seven books and wrote seven books. It's just that I keep having great ideas for my next HP costume and then remembering that there won't be another launch party because there won't be another book. I remember feeling sort of the same when Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air, because even though I felt the show was floundering, I'd been watching those characters for a long time and I cared about them. I also missed the experience of watching with my friends. It's fun to have some common culture stuff to bat around.

I suppose I should now turn my attention to the slightly more pressing matter of packing everything in my apartment. Sigh.

potter party and one picture that will horrify Jennifer

On the eve of the release of the final book in the Harry Potter series, how could we do less? So here's our Harry:



and his archnemesis (children fled before Lord Voldemort...except for two girls who poked him in the face, declared "You have no powers!" and then decided that they could defeat him with teen magazines)



Professor Trelawny



who apparently saw a dark portent in the tea



Dobby




Professor McGonnagle



The Fat Lady from the Gryffindor common room portrait



The Fat Lady and Moaning Myrtle



Beauxbatons chicks dig Quidditch players. It's true.



aaaaand, me with my new boyfriend Merlin. Oh my god, I love Merlin so much. I missed him all day today. I now want a snake, which is not an experience I ever expected to have. Too bad I don't have a picture of spook with the tarantula...

your wish is my command

It has come to my attention (ahem, J., I am looking at you) that I haven't been blogging enough. Partly I will confess it's because my internet time has been eaten by a dual obsession with facebook and what's happening on Battlestar Galactica. Not pretty, but true.

I'm really excited about this book that I've ordered in at the store called "She's Such a Geek!" Even though it's about women in science and math rather than women in Dungeons and Dragons, I suspect I will relate.

Also: sun! sun! sun! sun!

I didn't promise quality in my more frequent blogging.

ETA: apparently, there is mention of D&D in "She's Such a Geek". it's like Christmas and my birthday all rolled together.