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And talking about being me.

I don’t so much buy presents… except for the kids in my life. Once they’re seven or eight, I have no problems: so many books I know and love already, and of course I welcome any excuse to find more great ones. Best of all is when the child’s tastes run to slightly different genres than I usually read, so I’m forced to read up… I first read China Mieville’s UN LUN DUN and Nancy Farmer’s THE EAR, THE EYE AND THE ARM when testing them for my cousin Alex. (Both passed.)

But when it comes to littler kids, I’m at a loss. I don’t really know what’s age-appropriate, and I don’t know what’s so famous that they’re likely to have it already. Luckily, I now have a blog. And with a blog comes links. My savior this year? 100 Scope Notes’s Best New Books category. Holiday success.

The most gratifying gift-giving moment was undoubtedly due to my cousin Luke’s — Luke of Mean Elizabeth fame — preschool apparently having taught him appropriate responses to receiving a present. As soon as he ripped the paper off of JEREMY DRAWS A MONSTER, he yelled, “It’s JUST what I ALWAYS WANTED!”

As opposed to my niece Sylvia of the same age, whose perpetual response ran more to looking hopeful and asking, “Are there any more presents for me?”

Sylvia also took the time to read several of her favorite books to me. Since she doesn’t read in the traditional sense, this involves her telling me a story based on the pictures and what she remembers from past readings. In her telling, a common feature of stories seems to be their emphasis on YELLED NARRATION.

My other interaction with small children this holiday season was when Emily and I went sledding in Prospect Park. (I’ve recently learned to sled and have now become a sledding fiend. I wanted to take Sylvia out yesterday but the snow had dissipated.) We took it upon ourselves to teach them some valuable lessons about the importance of moving off the hill once your turn is done, lest two shrieking women lying on top of one another in an inflatable bialy run you down. I’m not sure whether all their parents were as grateful as they should have been for our didactic efforts.

My grandma was in fine form this Thanksgiving.

My dad has a new mustache, and as soon as she saw him, she said, “Now, X*, do you want to look older or younger?”

My dad, who is 62, considered all the various sarcastic responses he might make, but eventually settled on the straightforward answer that he’d like to look younger. To which she immediately responded, “Well, I think your mustache makes you look ten years older!”

Oh, Grandma.

(She didn’t drop it all weekend, either.)

I shouldn’t laugh too hard — although, let me tell you, I did — because I am so unbelievably tactless myself. Like, when I met my boyfriend — who needs a Blog Name, by the way — he hated most vegetables, including delicious ones like spinach, because he grew up eating them boiled to shit. And so what do I do when we’re eating spinach one time with his lovely mother? I very innocently explain how I had to convince him to eat spinach, since he grew up eating it prepared in the most terrible ways!

Seriously, folks. It never crossed my mind that the person I was speaking to was the one who did that terrible preparing.

His mother was really amazingly nice about the whole thing.

* I’m leaving my dad’s name out of it because his first name is extremely unusual and should someone ever google him just with that — which would definitely work for finding him — I don’t think he’d want them turning up this story!

One of the high points of this Thanksgiving has been getting to see my oldest cousin’s children more. Nico, 6, and Luke, 3, are super cute. And Nico loves me. Luke? Well… he wasn’t so sure.

On Wednesday night he waddled up to me and said, “There’s a mean Elizabeth in my class.” Then he stared at me accusingly for a moment before picking up his dump truck and pushing it around, muttering, “Mean Elizabeth.”

Thanksgiving Day when I passed him in the hallway he said plaintively, “Why are there so many Elizabeths?”

I think I was eventually able to win him over with my willingness to pretend we were in a space boat, but man. What could this Elizabeth actually have done to him???

Click to enlarge. And yes, by “the day” I do, in fact, mean yesterday.

Tuesday, November 16th, 2004
It is impossible to imagine what the Iraqi feels right now

Do you know that Aya’s grandfather was killed last Thursday by one of the American soldiers’ bullets? When Aya is eight years old and asks me how her grandfather died, what will I answer her? What do you think I should answer her? When I tell her the American soldiers killed him, of course she will ask me why and how and did I do anything about that?

The answer to her question is this post and the others. I can answer her that I did do something about it. I did what I could in that time. I wrote in my blog about what is going on in Iraq.

– Hadiya, IRAQIGIRL: DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL IN IRAQ

* * * * *

IRAQIGIRL is going to print today.

At various points since Emily and I started this blog in January, I’ve mentioned cryptically that I was occupied with a project involving young adult lit that I would write about soon. But somehow I never did write about it.

Just under a year ago, Haymarket Books asked me first to weigh in on, and then eventually to edit, a submission they’d received. It was an Iraqi teenager’s blog, assembled into a manuscript by the journalist John Ross.

And today it’s off to the printer. It hasn’t quite sunk in.

The reason I never wrote about it, I think, is that I’ve been so close to it, so fixated on little details, that it was actually hard to step back and describe it. And now it’s being printed and it is finally, fully out of my hands.

More later. Including the beautiful cover (which, by the way, is not the one on Amazon; it’s better).

I’m interviewing potential roommates all week, and a dilemma this has raised is: how much do I want to portray a better version of myself that someone might actually want to live with, vs. portraying myself accurately so I find someone who actually wants to live with me?

Specifically, this dilemma has come up around cleaning my house, because I am a mess, but attempting to reform, and I know from experience that if I live with another messy person, it’s all over. I need to live with someone who has a culture of putting things away so that I learn how to do it, too. But if I live with someone who’s deeply bothered by mess and clutter… well, we’ll kill each other within the month.

So it’s a delicate balance. With house cleaning, I found — I think — a middle ground involving presenting myself as I realistically aspire to be: the place is neat, but you can kind of tell that the person who lives here doesn’t totally have her shit together.

But anyway, especially now that the place is cleaned up, it strikes me how much the books are the dominating feature of the space. Piles and piles and piles of books. Books about politics and history (the vast majority), books about writing and statistics, and oh so many children’s books.*

I actually mentioned in my Craigslist ad that I bring to the roommate relationship an outstanding collection of classic teen television on DVD. Now maybe I’ll find a roommate who walks in and gets excited by my Sarah Dessen collection. Or the Ramonas. I would definitely trust a roommate who still felt strongly about Ramona.

* The last all live together; I have a case that’s just for my books — my books on things my boyfriend doesn’t care about, that is — which has all the kids’ books, the stats and math books, and the books on teen TV, all living together happily. (The political books, we read each other’s.)

This is possible only because the overwhelming preponderance of my children’s books still reside in New York. Some of these are at my parents’ house, and I cycle some of these back and some of those here when I visit; I should just have them all shipped to me. More of my old favorites, my mom tells me, are “in storage,” and all I can say is that I sincerely hope that’s not a euphemism in the vein of, “Furrball is so happy out on the dairy farm in Westchester!”

Like the blogger Drek at the sociology blog Scatterplot, from which I am stealing this video, I take things much too literally. I, too, blame this trait for my inability to “get” poetry (a fact which causes no end of frustration to my boyfriend, who writes it; he thinks I’m just not trying).

There’s a particular irony in my case, though, because I am a highly sarcastic individual. And yet also highly gullible, as I am, inexplicably, prone to interpreting others credibly. Said boyfriend and I used to live in Brooklyn, where we had a really busybody landlord living on the ground floor of the same building — a fact I was not too happy about. I was kind of ill when we moved in, so I went to sleep in the middle of the floor, surrounded by boxes, while he went out with his friend. The next morning I was expressing my fears about living with a landlord who always seemed to be hanging around watching, when this exchange occurred:

BOYFRIEND: Yeah, she was still sitting outside watching when I got in last night.
ELIZABETH: What? What time was that?
BOYFRIEND: Maybe 2, 3 AM.
ELIZABETH: Oh my god. We’ll never be able to get away from her! We’ll have to run in and out of the house!
BOYFRIEND: Actually, she said she was going to stop by for brunch this morning.
ELIZABETH: [horror]
BOYFRIEND: I think she’ll be here any minu– [pauses, listening] — Is that her?
ELIZABETH: [grim, efficient determination] Okay, let’s think. Maybe we can sneak out the window!

I was totally serious, y’all. (We lived on the third floor of a building with very high ceilings, by the way.) The boyfriend, fortunately, was not.

Anyway, after that excessively long and irrelevant set-up, here is the literally-minded Total Eclipse of the Heart:

And now, to finally make this nominally relevant to our blog: I have noticed that my reading habits have changed with the blog, and I’m not sure if it’s blogging itself (which has made me think more about what I’m reading and take note of cool lines for the Wednesday Words) or things I started doing at around the same time, which partially inspired me to start the blog (reading other blogs, reading books about how fiction is constructed, reading more new children’s lit instead of my same old favorites). But one thing I’ve observed is how much more I appreciate metaphors than I did when I was little.

Like, I had this bizarre experience reading PAPER TOWNS:

Internal Monologue Dialogue

• I love this passage about the strings and the ships and the grass!
• Um, it’s a two-page passage about metaphors for death.
• But it’s beautiful!
• The characters are talking to each other about what’s the best metaphor for death!!!
• But they’re picking such good ones!

(I have very explicit arguments with myself in my head.)

So, is this just a sign of getting older — I was never one of those super-literary kids; I loved to read, but it was always trash — or is book blogging going to make me a more high-minded reader? Might I somehow become a poetry fan after all??

(…Doubtful.)

I promise I have real book-related posts coming. I even have them half-written! It’s just, I’m in finals, and thinking a even little bit systematically about anything — even breezy teen romances — is a bit much for me. Thus, we have instead: this clip from one of my ongoing Self-Improvement Projects: Learning to Drive.

ELIZABETH: I am a driving machine! I handle motor vehicles with aplomb!
BOYFRIEND: You need to work on staying in your lane.
ELIZABETH: I move wheel, car obeys! I am its master!
BOYFRIEND: Did you see that stop sign there?
ELIZABETH: Whoa, why is that car coming toward me? Does it not grasp that I control the road?!
BOYFRIEND: Yes, the other cars are why you need to stay in your lane.
ELIZABETH: …Why are there FOOLS standing in the ROAD?
BOYFRIEND: You’re not going to hit them.
ELIZABETH: Don’t they care that they are PLAYING WITH THEIR LIVES?
BOYFRIEND: Please be less outraged by fools, more attentive to location of car.
ELIZABETH: FOOLS, GET OUT OF THE ROAD!
BOYFRIEND: …
ELIZABETH: Hey, that fool is my professor!
[Wild waving ensues. Unclear whether near-victim realized the precariousness of his own survival.]
BOYFRIEND: I think this is enough practice for today.

We are both blogging this week about Frankie Landau-Banks, her history, and its lack of reputability. Emily posts about the book’s use of language today; come back tomorrow (or however we space them out) for Elizabeth’s take on the book’s feminism.

Elizabeth had told me I would love THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS, by E. Lockhart. Not just that it was a great book, but that I particularly would love it, and she couldn’t tell me why because that would ruin it, but trust her.

So I was at Barnes and Noble soon after that and picked it up to read a few pages and see if it was worth buying, and I got to page 2 and burst out laughing at “It’s not for me to pugn or impugn their characters.” And then I finished reading Frankie’s letter to the headmaster and really couldn’t contain my glee at “gruntlement”, and I called Elizabeth and left a long voicemail, in which I definitely gave up on words a few times in favor of happy squeal noises, and said I didn’t know if this was what she meant as the reason I would particularly love this book (as it turned out it wasn’t), but it was incredible and if there was some other reason on top of it I couldn’t even fathom what a great book this would be.

And while there are many great things about TDHFLB, having read it fully twice what I genuinely love most, is the language, and that’s for a few reasons. One is just I like language and puns and silly words and silly usages of words, and did I say puns? So reading that Frankie does not want to pugn anybody’s character is endlessly amusing for me. On a deeper level, though, I think Lockhart does an incredible job of using Frankie’s language and thought patterns (which relate properly to each other in the way that they do in real people) to create her as a character. And while lots of books have characters with clear styles of speaking, or accents, or slang, that help put them in a time and place and form a piece of the character, I can’t think of another book where not just the way a character speaks, but the way she herself explicitly thinks about language are so key to understanding her personality.

It also helps that Frankie’s particular attitude towards language happens to be very similar to mine. I like to use language the way it ought to logically work, even when that’s not how it really works. I always get annoyed at the redundancy of the phrase “from whence”; and when no actual word in the English language signified the meaning I needed to express in my senior thesis, I made one up and used it throughout. I was telling a friend of mine about TDHFLB and the neglected positives and it was only once we were deep in argument that I realized we were having almost the exact conversation that Frankie and Matthew have:

“Mmmm,” she whispered. “Now I’m gruntled.”
“What?”
“Gruntled. I was disgruntled before.”
…
“And now, you’re…”
“Gruntled.”
She had expected Matthew’s face to light at the new word, but he touched her chin lightly and said, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”
…
“Gruntled means grumpy,” he said, walking over to the dictionary, which stood on a large stand.
…
“Why? Frankie was cross that he was being so literal. “That makes no sense, because if gruntled means grumbly, then disgruntled should mean un-grumbly.”
“Um…” Matthew scanned the dictionary. “Dis- can be an intensifier, as well as a negative.”
Frankie bounced on the couch. “I like my version better.”

EMILY: And the best thing is, she comes up with these neglected positives, like where there’s a word with a negative prefix but the positive version isn’t a word or doesn’t mean what it should. Like, there’s disgruntled, but there’s no gruntled. Hee! Gruntled!
ADAM: But that doesn’t really work, its not how the language evolved.
EMILY: But gruntled!
ADAM: We have different attitudes towards language. I don’t like made up words.
EMILY: Or ept! Like inept, ept.
ADAM: Yes. I’m glad you’re enjoying.
EMILY: But they’re such good made up words. And sometimes you have to make up words, if the one you need doesn’t exist.
ADAM: Then you find a word that does exist.
EMILY: I like my way better.

A lot of folks have written a lot of great posts and comments about why TDHFLB is a great book, and Elizabeth’s going to write about feminism in the book tomorrow later this week, but ultimately, why I love it is neglected positives.

So I’m rewatching ONCE AND AGAIN, a Herskovitz & Zwick (the producers of MY SO-CALLED LIFE) show. Why? Because it’s finals time.* Ahem.

And there’s a lot of things I’m thinking this time through, mostly centering on how much recognition I feel at all the classically identifiable H&Z moments and tropes. Some of which is wonderful and moving for me, and more of which, actually, is annoying than I would have expected.

But here’s my question. They did a simply amazing job of casting the teen girl actors, Evan Rachel Wood (who’s gone on to a very successful movie career) and Julia Whelan (who I believe mostly stopped acting after the show). And the teen male lead is… not as good. I don’t recall whether he improves later in the show (I’m still just halfway through season one), but it’s very noticeable. He’s not awful, but… the difference is striking.

And it’s making me remember just how incredible Claire Danes was in MSCL, and how in a few key scenes, Jared Leto just doesn’t measure up. (Like, after they’ve broken up and he comes to her house to return her bike, except it’s really Brian’s bike, and they’re talking about sex and death, and it turns out her dad is listening the whole time…)

So, obviously any show can have a dud actor. And I’m not talking about duds here, just actors who don’t always rise to the greatness of their costars. (And actually, I think the weakest acting in MSCL comes from Devon Odessa, who plays Sharon.) But H&Z have been consistently incredibly successful about casting female leads who take your breath away. Is it a general pattern that in the teenage years, it’s more common for female actors to reach great heights of naturalistic displays of emotion? Or am I overreaching? What do you guys think?

* I don’t actually watch much TV anymore; I never watch it live. But some semesters, when I’m really in a panic over finals, I feel an inexplicable urge to watch my shows. My first semester of grad school, I didn’t watch any TV all semester (which was actually kind of an adjustment, moving away from my parents’ TiVo and all)… until finals hit, when I suddenly felt compelled to watch three seasons of ANGEL. (My first-year-of-grad-school roommate and I picked one another for several reasons, but the complementary nature of our respective TV-on-DVD collections was not the most minor of them. I had MSCL and the Collectors’ Edition of Freaks and Geeks, both of which were hard to find at that time; she had… everything else.)

But yeah. I don’t know if this pattern is a reaction to the anxiety (Avoidance, the Greatest Strategy of Them All!) or because when I’m so close to freedom I start fantasizing all the things I could do with it and then I really want to, or what. But this semester’s papers are a particularly painful bunch for me (as measured by the triumvirate of how much I care about these classes (a lot), how much I’ve done on these papers (almost nil), and how soon they are due (let’s not discuss it)), so ONCE AND AGAIN it is.