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Showing posts from October, 2014

Gone girl

I wore my red rain poncho to school. The highschoolers thought I was disguised for Halloween, but no, I was just prepared for rain.

This afternoon, for the first time in the season, it snowed.

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Mary is on quite the Gillian Flynn kick. She watched Gone Girl in the theater. When she got home, she wanted to read my copy of the novel, but I was like, No way, I’m reading it. And so she bought a copy of her own and sped through it. Then she sneaked into my bedroom and climbed over my laundry and stole my copies of Sharp Objects and Dark Places. It took her just a couple of days to speed through Sharp Objects. Dark Places is taking her a little longer to read because she keeps on having to go to her job.

I too finished reading Gone Girl. I told Mary I thought it ended (sort of) happily, but Mary said it didn’t.

(Mary likes to oscillate between extremes of darkness, e.g. Gillian Flynn, and light, e.g. our lovely cat Bianca.)

(One night, Mary was singing “Meow Mix” to Bianca. Then she put on some *real* music for us to listen to, but soon she was combining it with “Meow Mix”:
Are you going
To Scarborough Fair?
Meow, meow, meow,
Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow?)
I digress. What an ending Gone Girl (the novel) has! (I’ll try not to spoil it, but be wary.) When the Bible says that the sheep shall lie down with the lion, it doesn’t say how the sheep and the lion shall each decide to lie together. Gone Girl describes one way that that could happen. An imperfect way. Still, for imperfect creatures, what else would be appropriate? (Or possible?)

The book has three parts:
  • “Boy Loses Girl”;
  • “Boy Meets Girl”; and
  • “Boy Gets Girl Back (Or Vice Versa).”
Part Three’s title is ambiguous. Is it about reconciliation? Or revenge? Or both?

Authors aren’t infallible. But Flynn insists that she likes both of her characters, the husband and the wife; and as awful as we may think those characters are, if someone likes them – even if it’s someone who happens to have created them – there just might be something about them to like.

A grand day off

Office-aide job A-OK.

Tutoring job old hat; still A-OK.

Dissertation not A-OK. (Old hat, though.)

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Along with the highschoolers, I have the day off, and so I want to use this empty moment to tell you to watch the first half of A.S. Roma vs. F.C. Bayern Munich, which was played last Tuesday for the UEFA Champions League. It was a fascinating first half. Not the prettiest first half I’d seen, but perhaps the awesomest one (and you know I never exaggerate). Bayern outscored Roma 5−0, and Roma weren’t even playing badly; Bayern were just that good. Their movements on the field were so intricate, so quick, I had trouble tracking them.

It wasn’t my favorite kind of soccer. It wasn’t effortless enough, and it wasn’t politically significant. It was astounding nonetheless.

The game should be available for a while on espn3.com.

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Today, out of love for Martin, I’m going to do some serious cleaning up. I’m going to clean up my bedroom, and I’m going to clean up the books that I’ve left stacked in the dining room. Also, I’ve lost my phone and I need to clean up the house to find it. Mary has the day off, too. Last night, she and I and Martin celebrated by going to the food court in the mall. We got into separate lines; I was counting out my quarters when Mary sneaked up behind me, put a five-dollar bill in my hand, and sneaked away. This melted the heart of the cashier, who tried to flirt with me. … Later, M&M and I went to Barnes & Noble, and though I didn’t have money to buy anything, I was able to look at the fonts.

The office aide

My new part-time job: secretary in the English and Social Studies depts at a local high school. (Afternoons, I continue tutoring at IUSB.) On my first workday, my new bosses didn’t have time to show me what to do, so they were like, “Just roam the halls and get acquainted with the school.” So I did that for four hours. (A security guard took pity on me and gave me a tour; later, a teacher gave me pretty much the same tour.)

Since then, I’ve been kept busier. They’ve trained me to use the photocopier, and they’ve told me which books to shelve and which books to put into boxes. I’ve spent many hours doing those things. We had a “lockdown” drill on Wednesday: it was my favorite part of the week. I had to sit for thirty minutes alone with the English dept chair, in her classroom; she kept trying to get rid of me, but whenever she’d open the door to let me out she’d see the principal or the police dogs and get nervous and close the door. After a while she let me just sit on her couch and read her Harold Bloom Shakespeare book.

Though I’m happy at my new workplace, I can’t help but dwell on its absurdities …

like, how mice scurry across the classroom floors;

like, how the guards are always having to round up the stray student-zombies who wander through the halls;


like, how already I’ve been asked to guest-lecture on philosophy (there’s an International Baccalaureate philosophy class, “Theory of Knowledge”);


like, how I have power over all the teachers because I control the photocopier staples (some aspects of this job are going to my head).


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Melanie Griffith, Tippi Hedren, and a lion: they remind me of a different family and their cat.

Bad TV

So exhausting was our encounter with the mouse, I needed a two-week rest from blogging.

My parents have returned to Ecuador.


Ana & David have returned to Texas.


My old flatmate, Kenny, and his wife, Lara, have moved to California.


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This will be my second year living in Mary’s & Martin’s house. I resolve (a) to do more cleaning up out of love for Martin, and (b) to uncomplainingly watch more bad TV out of love for Mary, who needs to have bad TV playing as background noise while she grades her students’ homework. (Good TV distracts her too much.) She watches such dreck as Dawson’s CreekKitchen Nightmares16 and Pregnant; and Call the Midwife, which has a birth scene in each episode. Her best show by far is Downton Abbey; alas, I’ve viewed most of that show six or seven times, and I’m not sure I could endure much more of it. (All right, I could.) … To my surprise, I’m not minding slogging through Beverly Hills 90210. I forgive its characters for being so self-important, because they’re so naïve.