Forget About It
I just finished reading Caprice Crane’s Forget About It, a little romantic comedy about a girl with the worst life ever and to top it all off, gets hit by a car while on her bicycle and decides to suffer from fake amnesia to give her life a new starting point. Although it’s set in New York and has a bit of You’ve Got Mail quirkiness, it feels so familiar and southern. Probably because I’m southern and if it feels homey and familiar it must be southern! Which is just a fault of my own, not a fault of the writer’s. Not quite as hilarious as her debut Stupid and Contagious, but quite funny nonetheless, it was a much needed break from the doom I’ve been feeling while reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I sped through it in a delightful day off and still had time to get my chores done. Caprice Crane truly is the best at romantic comedy (a genre I am not too fond of unless the characters are in long flowing dresses and top hats) as she actually does keep me in stitches and does make me believe the happy couple should indeed have a happy ending. Jane Austen would be proud despite all its contemporary pop culture because Crane, like herself, is a master of the absurd and a breath of fresh air.
What’s Up With Those Templars?
So in Fall of 2009 I started a discussion thread in my book club about The Templars and Freemasons, and all those other secret societies that seem to have become lumped into one cohesive thought over that last few hundred years. I thought it would be fun and interesting (not unlike the Darwin study I’ve been doing lately). No one joined me.
My Book List was to Include:
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco (fiction)
The Holy Bible – I am still using the Archaeological Study Bible put out by Zondervan (religion) as well as another version called ESV.
The Masonic Ritual or Guide to the Three Symbolic Degrees of the Ancient York Rite – Grand Lodge Free and Accepted Masons at San Antonio, Texas (religion/secret societies/ Freemasons/ occult)
Adoptive Rite Ritual of the Order of the Eastern Star together with the Queen of the South – arranged by Robert Macoy (religion/secret societies/Freemasons/ occult)
The Amaranth – Robert Macoy (religion/secret societies/ Freemasons/ occult)
The Templars – Piers Paul Read (history/religion/secret societies/ Freemasons/ occult)
The Meaning of Masonry – W. L. Wilmshurst (religion/ secret societies/ Freemasons/ occult)
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott – (fiction / literature)
also for fun…
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown (fiction/ mystery)
The Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens (fiction/ literature)
Out of those, I read Foucault’s Pendulum (which was brilliant, as are all things Umberto Eco) and I just finished the book by Piers Paul Read.
Why did it take so long?
Piers Paul Read has an extensive history that spans three or so centuries – parts are fascinating and I couldn’t put the book down, and other parts were dull and I couldn’t wait to put the book down. What I discovered upon completion of the book, though, is that I was just being made more and more aware of how many interesting people there are in history that I should be reading biographies on! Eleanor of Aquitaine is mentioned a bit right around page 140 or so… There’s a picture of Richard the Lionheart in battle featured in the ‘centerfold’ pictures. I should know more about these people who are so well known among historians that every day people recognize their names too. Its not enough for me to recognize them – I want to KNOW them.
I noticed too that I tended to plod slowly through this book (and this topic in general) because it seems to create more questions than it answers. There is so much documentation of so many conflicting ideas. Were the knights actually crusaders for Christ? Were their actions even remotely compatible with the teachings of Jesus? Or, were they really devil worshipers like so many throughout history convicted them of being? Can the documented confessions be trusted? Or was it all just a a little too similar to events such as the Salem Witch Hunts?
The discussion thread for the book club is still open – join and add your thoughts there: http://www.shelfari.com/groups/32350/discussions/136727/Knights-Templar-Books-
Or, just tell me your opinion below. Also, if you’ve read something interesting on the Templars or the Freemasons, share the book and your review of it as a comment. I plan to continue my studies on the topic.
Insomniac
Memories of My College Years…
Four hours is a good nights rest, she tried to tell him. They told her she was an insomniac… or maybe she told her that. But she knew she wasn’t really. She could sleep; she just wasn’t good at it. Sleeping was some kind of secret art that people withheld teaching her. Any good sleep she got happened in the late afternoon or early evening hours. Not in the night, when her beloved moon she never saw was awake, not then. Sleep could not or would not come to her then, at least not until 3:00 or 4:00, well 4:00, sometimes 5:00 in the morning.
She liked his tie. It was checkered… shiny… mesmerizing – “What?” she was in class. Oh yeah, class. But she knew that, she had been there all along, and before that in the library, and before that in her room, and before that lunch where she had told them, “Four hours is a good nights rest.” More than she’d had all week. Three hours at a time was usually an accomplishment and that usually only happened after she worked out. She’d work out, and then pass out. If she didn’t run three miles a day, she’d never sleep.
… I don’t miss it.
I’m That Girl
I am the kind of girl who drinks brandy out of martini glasses when her husband isn’t home. I buy betta fish when I’m sad, which I pet periodically as though they were cats, they arch their backs and like it, too. People label me a clean freak, but most the time I don’t see how because my house is never clean enough. I eat my grapefruit pulp by pulp, literally, never with a spoon and never with sugar. I compulsively buy shampoo and conditioner, and am obsessive about using the same amount simultaneously – I hate running out of one before the other, and my head can never be filled with multiple smells. But am more compulsive about buying and using what I call “smell goodness” for my house (plug-ins, oil burners and oil, candles, incense, room sprays, etc.). I swear I can smell cashmere sweaters on rich women, which no one believed me until Emily on the patio of Hoffbrau Steaks. I like my dog more than most human beings, will carry him in my arms like a baby, but wont touch a human baby unless I have to. And I cannot live without a to do list. I’m that kind of girl.
I’m the kind of girl who people laugh at a lot, not because I’ve made a joke, or because they are making fun of me, but because somehow things I say are funny to them. My favorite explanation so far has been by a co-worker, Jana, “I find your neurosis humorous.” She’s talking about the fact that I judge my books by the cover, and they cannot feature children’s faces on the front, but feet are ok. I’ll buy any book that has cool shoes on the front (but they can’t be leopard print, modern high heels, or pink). I awkwardly told a supervisor of mine that he’s probably ‘pleasant’ when he hits on people. The same night another kid I worked with called me a ‘job-lover’ and I couldn’t decide whether it was an insult or not. Pecans creep me out. I like to watch people floss their teeth, especially if they’re doing it at work. I hate to cook, but I love to eat and I love to feed people, therefore I cook a lot. I invite people to my house that will never come over, for the sake of inviting them and hoping they’ll show up. I’m that girl.
The funny thing is, although I’ve changed and look very different to the public eye, I’ve been pretty much the same my whole life. I always was a bit of a geek; I will always be a bit of a geek. But the reason I am who I am are different than the reasons I was what I was. Now, I’m a geek because I want to be one, I cherish it, the books the reading, the learning, the art of it all. I’m that girl.
I’m the girl who was raised by a bloodline obsessed father.
Daddy was really into genealogy. He still is. It’s truly his passion. It completely makes sense, he loves history and he loves himself – so researching his own history is the perfect past time for him. As much as we tease him about it, it made for some really memorable family vacations. We got to meet a lot of people, we visited lots of museums and libraries, we hung out with really old people with fascinating life stories and pictures in shoe boxes to back them up, and the best part – cemeteries.
To this day, I love cemeteries.
We would hike through the woods and find the old family plots that had stones from the early 1800’s rolling down the hill. We would piece tombstones together and make rubbings of them and take the rubbings home as evidence of the find. Some of my fondest memories of my parents involve my mom and I trekking through a cemetery to find the most interesting life story, or the plot with the best tree nearby. Southern heat is a good reason to find shade and sit down when outdoors, and a lot of my shade and sitting was done next to a grave site. I usually hung out with the dead and read a good book. I liked intense and gory mystery thrillers and historical fiction that involved girls in big dresses. Essentially, I liked a good book of any genre (still do), and I liked reading under a tree (still do), and I loved being in cemeteries when I did it (still do?).
The best cemetery trip ever, my Grandma happened to be there. It got to be lunch time and she pulled a beach towel out of my mom’s van, spread it on the grass and started making a picnic lunch. It was a hot summer in Alabama and I went to sit in the grass and use the towel as a table. “Get off that grass, you’re gonna get red-bug.” Texans call them chiggers. I scooted over to the towel and my grandma fed me lunch in the grass of a cemetery.
“Grandma, we’re on graves.”
“Their dead, they don’t care.”
It was ironic and struck me so even at the time. My grandmother was one of the most superstitious southerners I had ever met, and here she was not caring about something that even un-superstitious people would care about. I ate my egg salad sandwich in peace and enjoyed the hot sun.
What’s strange about our memories is that I remember my sister being there with us. I remember Daddy hunting down the right gravesite and mom in tow with her camera to take pictures of it. There was no one else in sight, although my grandfather had to have been somewhere if my grandma was there.
My sister does not remember this at all. In fact, she insists she wasn’t there.
She wasn’t. She would have already been in college at the age that I remember myself being in that moment. So why is this memory so warped from time? I remember it so clearly, if I think really hard I can actually feel the sun on my shoulders that day and the texture of the beach towel. I can even remember which beach towel it was. I can hear my grandma say the phrase “red bug” like a true southerner.
Its so much a part of me and who I am, this memory. Its a moment of bliss. Its a moment that I’ve held onto for a long time. Because I’m nostalgic that way, and when I think of myself, I think of myself as a girl eating an egg salad sandwich with her grandma, her parents hunting down dead relatives, enjoying the grass, the sun, the trees, and the south. I think of myself hanging out in a cemetery. I’m that girl.
Intelligent Design: More Than a Bandwagon
A Review of Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box
I thoroughly enjoyed Behe’s well-crafted and easy-to-understand argument against Darwinian “science.” I found Biology fascinating when I was in school, and this has sparked some of that forgotten love for studying things under the microscope. I would like more Darwinist groups to actually give this book the time it deserves rather than casting it aside because they think its a soap-box for Creationists. Behe clearly states that he is NOT a Creationist at the beginning of the book – put your pride aside and see what he has to say about his research before you judge his viewpoint.
Anakalian Whims 
Oh Dear, Another Vonnegut…
February 2, 2010 at 4:45 pm (Reviews) (book, cat's cradle, classic, religious practices, review, science fiction, social commentary, vonnegut)
A Review of Cat’s Cradle (kind of)
Buy a copy here: http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=anakawhims-20&o=1&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=038533348X
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