What Have I Been Reading?

I’ve been reading my regular magazines: The New Yorker, The Believer, Surfer, and Vanity Fair. Lots of good fun and information, including some great Believer interviews with Slavoj Zizek and book reviews by Nick Hornby. I love the Vanity Fair stuff on Dubya, too.

Over vacation I took a break from serious reading. I read Douglas Coupland’s All Families are Psychotic. I must say, I’m a big fan of Coupland’s (and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to visit his hometown of Vancouver, B.C.), but I didn’t feel great about this novel. I loved Generation X and Life after God. I really liked Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma, and Polaroids from the Dead. All Families . . . has got some interesting characters and some compelling meditations on modern life, but I felt like the story was too tedious and bizarre. Plus, it seemed to contradict the title. If the story was to illustrate that all families are psychotic, I would have expected a more typical family than this one, whose ill-fate not only gave them an abusive father, but AIDS (three cases), Thalydomide poisoning, and kidnapping (not to mention an astronaut daughter and a son who worked for a reclusive European billionairre who seems to be omnipotent). Plus, the ending was really disappointing, all problems being resolved in the most bizarre ways.

I also read John Irving’s A Widow for One Year. I’ve already seen the film, “The Door in the Floor,” and this is a case where I liked the film better than the novel. Irving knows how to combine character and plot in ways that keep you turning the pages, but still I have to admit that I read the last one hundred pages out of duty more than out of engagement. This is a novel in which all the main characters are writers, a ploy which might have proven fatal to a less capable storyteller, but Irving pulls it off. What didn’t work for me was the way he had drawn his protagonist, Ruth Cole. Something about her didn’t quite ring true for me, and I tired of hearing the narrator repeatedly tell me that she had “wonderful breasts.” By contrast, I’m reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and his Becky Sharp is a far more interesting and compelling protagonist (even if she is not “a hero”). (I know I should have read this novel by now, but remember, I’m a recovering evangelical who was discouraged from reading fiction as a child and young adult.)

I also read David Sedaris’ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Firoozeh Dumas' Funny in Farsi. I love Sedaris. I’m jealous of Sedaris. I think I can do something like his work . . . if I’d just make the time. Dumas was funny, touching, and enlightening at times. It's an easy read, but gives you a real sense of her family's immigrant experience.

Where Have I Been?

I’ve been away for a long, long time. The last two or three weeks in July I was feeling sick and broken down. I had terrible headaches and felt nauseous almost every day. I was just trying to make it to my vacation. I was popping Ibuprofin and Acetamenophin (sp?) like lifesavers, trying to keep myself from sinking under the emotional weight of the last five years—that feeling of failure dragging me down—and the general stress I feel about my life and the dread I feel at the church where I work.

Then, during our last church softball game, on the last Thursday of the month (which I'm now dreading again because this guy who thinks our coed softball team is the most important athletic contest of the year and yells at everyone all the time, is playing again), I broke my finger diving for a foul ball. This delayed our vacation for a couple of days (which we actually needed in order to really get packed) and put my hand in a splint, which I’m supposed to wear all the time, except when I’m showering. I can’t write, or even hold a pen, when I’m wearing it, so I haven’t been writing much.

Finally, on August 4, we rolled out of our driveway at around 6:30 a.m. and drove all the way to Mount Shasta. The next day we drove to Crater Lake where we spent a couple of hours, then on to the Columbia River Gorge/Hood River area (gorgeous, breathtaking, etc.). The next day we messed around in the Gorge for awhile then drove up to the Johnson’s Ridge Visitors Center on Mt. St. Helen's, and then up to Seattle, where we spent six nights and five days visiting with Barbara’s family and hanging out in the area. From there we went to Vancouver, B.C., where we spent two nights, and then to Victoria, where we spent two more nights, and then Port Angeles, where we spent another two nights and a couple of days exploring Olympic National Park. We then spent a night in Aberdeen, visiting one of Barbara’s cousins and doing some genealogical research (and getting a feel for Kurt Cobain’s hometown [where we both want to move, believe it or not]), and then we drove to Kelso, Washington to visit another of Barbara's cousins. Then we made a two-day dash for Irvine . . . and here I am.

I’m ignoring the doctor’s orders regarding keeping my splint on all the time. I’m taking it off to type, and this afternoon I took it off to go surfing twice in the last two days. The waves were smallish, but it hurt like a bitch to paddle. In the words of the orthopedic guy: it’s healing, but not healed.

The depression I feel over my job at the church is killing me again already, but I'm trying to stay away from there . . . it helps . . . at least to the extent that I out of sight can be out of mind. . .