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Soggy Toast

I’ve been reading Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean, which is a modern take on the fairy tale.

Sherlyn sent it to me and when I started reading it this morning I didn’t like it very much, admittedly because the book begins with a lot of different literary references that I didn’t recognize and I felt crabby with myself for not recognizing them. I kept reading, though, and it’s turning out to be a really excellent book that I like quite a lot. Anyway, the book takes place in a university in Minnesota (I’m beginning to think that all fiction written in the past ten years takes place in Minnesota) and I’m surprised that she’s captured the feel of being in college so well and have been remembering a lot of things about being in college myself which I’d forgotten completely. Most of the memories I have that are…oh, for lack of a better phrase, easily accessible, are about being in the computer lab talking on the computer to Marian or Todd, or two o’clock in the morning trips to the local family-style restaurant with Tina. For about two weeks we were largely nocturnal, you should have seen us walking out of the dim room into the sunlight, we were like vampires. Speaking of which, I’ve really got to call Tina back — we don’t have long distance so I have to go buy a phone card and everything, and our phone mail message doesn’t identify who you’re calling anymore (I thought making it clear to Ruth that I’d heard what she had to say on phone mail by changing the message people hear would be effective and it looks like it was, what a relief) so Tina wasn’t sure that she’d called the right number when she did call.

I’ve been thinking about the first year I was there, and the way that people banded together almost instantly, people with almost nothing in common. I ended up in a group that consisted of, I kid you not, Kirstin, Kristen, Tracey, and Tracie. Missouri is a sick, depraved place, don’t let anyone tell you different. We used to eat meals together, but it had nothing to do with enjoying each other’s company, it was just five people who didn’t want to eat alone. After about three weeks I realized that I far preferred eating alone to eating with people with whom the only thing I had in common was that we were all female human beings. This book also does a depressingly good job of describing university food — I remember going to visit Marian in Colorado where she was attending college and standing in line to eat and saying, “Marian, it looks like REAL FOOD, can I move in with you?” In Vermont, where Todd went to college, they had this bizarre food point system, where any given food cost you so many food points, and not only did they have extremely good general meals, you could buy Dove bars with your points too.

I was reading about a beginning lit. class in this book and found myself, very surprisingly, feeling wistful about being in a classroom. Or not even being in a classroom, really, but learning about fiction and what’s behind the words from someone who genuinely cares about what they’re teaching. I say this knowing that I am not fun at all to teach — I remember being in high school, my sophomore year, and actually reducing the teacher to shouting at me because I didn’t agree with the way she was teaching One Flew Over The Cukoo’s Nest. To begin with, I hated reading the book because I knew Kitey had been in the nuthouse and regardless of what Kesey knows or doesn’t know about what it’s like to be in the nuthouse it wasn’t exactly easy to keep an objective distance from anything that happens in the book. Most of it made me feel sick and horrified. And then the teacher started to make christian parallels, the protagonist was Jesus Christ, etc. Which really pissed me off.

I read the bible from start to finish when I was in fourth grade. I thought it was ridiculous, a sad comment on American society, and an ode to white men. It was the beginning of the end of my interest in any religion. So there I was, sitting at my desk with this teacher standing next to me, asking her if she’d ever heard of the separation of church and state, that she needed to remember that not everyone in the classroom was a christian, that she should be careful about what she tried to push on people, and this woman was standing over me actually shouting (she was an extremely quiet woman in her late sixties) and telling me how wrong I was. I lost, she won, I failed the test because I refused to answer any of the christian parallel questions.

I walked down to the deli that sells the french fries, listened to Ani Difranco on the way there (I can’t read when the sidewalks are icy) and was glad that I did, it was absolutely stunningly beautiful outside. Very blue blue blue sky and crisp cold air and just in general a lovely feeling of being alive. Nice.

Magic Decoder Ring

Temp Work