morning, morning (original) (raw)

I am slow today, so I may as well take my usual evening chunk of time waste and move it here. I had strange dreams last night. It start with being at an amusement park where there was no power to the rides but people were riding them for the thrill of that anyway, then became an altercation with a couple of people I don't much care for (but don't normally think about), and then I had to show up for the first completely disorganized rehearsal of a production of Man of La Mancha (and not only could I not make heads or tails of the materials being passed out, I was in the chorus and nobody else could sing), and then I couldn't get the alarm to turn off for an hour. That last part was actually a dream. I woke up squeezing it off in my hand, but then it turned out I wasn't actually holding my phone at all. My only guess here is anxiety over having too many things to do this week--or, perhaps, not more than I can physically finish, but a lot of urgent and overdue items that I have to tackle in the order my head can handle, versus the order in which they should actually be done. At present, I thought I'm where I thought I'd to be, so what's up, sad brain?

Anyway, my attention to inattention has finally, after a week of glances out the window, confirmed that the neighbors across the way don't ever plan to clean up after their dog.

I am having milk with the last of the chai, an English muffin with turkey and cheese, and then probably three containers of Greek yogurt. Maybe orzo with lemons and pasta later. It is clean out the fridge day and I forgot to eat most of yesterday.

Yesterday, I followed a linked tweet to novelist Chimamanda Adichie on dangers of listening to a single story. I think it's a really interesting talk, and most certainly worth a click. If you're a writer, especially.

Also,

Natalie Randolph will be the new head coach at a high school in D.C. Head football coach.

10. Terrier by Tamora Pierce
I admit it: the higher the fantasy, the less I care. It's funny, because a lot of fantasy is set in Medieval TimesTM, and I like historical novels, but then, I always get stuck on wow, I would not have liked to be alive then, fast forward at least a couple hundred years. And I fell asleep a lot in medieval history in college, because I was a freshman and the whole mess meant that I probably needed a good 12 hours of sleep a night, which I wasn't getting. Anyway, suffice to say that I am wary when a world, even a made-up one not meant to correspond with our own, is set with swords.

I enjoyed Terrier more than I thought I would. Beka Cooper is a girl who has lived in the slums and in a fine house, and now she's back in the slums as an apprentice policewoman. She's got one of the toughest beats in town, and just staying alive is hard enough (even with two excellent training officers)--but then she decides she wants to figure out why so many people have been disappearing. So, it's sort of a crime novel dressed up in the world of Tortall, with a big twist: the cops are crooked, too. Being good, being virtuous, there's none of the glory here. Thieves and cops are almost the same, and it's a matter of who you work for. I think this will do startlingly well for YA readers, because you have to keep questioning who's good and who's bad and what you mean by that.

11. Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
When Phillip Hoose was putting together a non-fiction YA book about historical U.S. teens, he ran across a bit about Claudette Colvin, and spent the next five years or so trying to get in touch with her through friends. Then, he conducted a series of interviews that brought to light her story (and I'm sort of surprised that she didn't end up co-authoring this, though I can also see why she might have refused, if it were offered).

Before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, Claudette Colvin, only a teenager, did the same, and she went to jail for it. Her case against segregation was unsuccessful in the Montgomery courts, and her charges slyly dropped so that she couldn't appeal to higher courts. This book tells her childhood, her story, her unheralded participation in the civil rights movement. She was the catalyst that inspired other women to stop giving up bus seats, though she wasn't, and hasn't, been lauded for doing so. In fact, this book, just through recounting of what was happening and Claudette's feelings, shows the darker side of things, where you realize that Claudette was only valuable to the movement when she was valuable to the movement; she was an unmarried teen mother, and her rights were worth defending only when it was the right time in the strategic process. The book isn't condemning so much as weaving together a story of the complexity of the civil rights movement, and I think it done extremely well. I give this book a lot of kudos--and I'm honestly having a hard time writing this review because it was a good book and I don't know how to explain it--for presenting the material in a way that encourages clarity of thought without telling me what I should think, and I think this is a stronger and more powerful and more inspiring story than the one we usually get in our U.S. history textbooks in 11th grade.