Torture
The worst level of torture happens in our own minds – mostly in the form of perceptions and lies.
I live in a state of an aching mind. The pressure behind the eyes. The mean reds. The emptiness in the pit of my gut, my heart, and my soul. And most of this ache is something I should be able to think my way out of, if I’m to embrace my own belief systems. I should be able to choose to be happier. I should be able to read something positive until I feel it. I should be able to think in truths and not get caught up in whatever lies I have allowed myself to believe that day.
But my aching mind has been here for months. Months and months and I just can’t kick it.
Eating doesn’t fix it. Working out doesn’t fix it. Reading suppresses it. Praying seems to make it worse – if only because my image of God is much like my memories of my own dad (smacking me on the head and saying, “Just don’t be stupid” as you can imagine is *so* helpful).
It’s that need to cry and not being able to. It’s the need to scream at the top of your lungs into a cavern and enjoy the echo back, but never having the opportunity to do so. It’s the need to sleep unabashedly half naked in the sunlight like I did when I was young and that being completely out of the question. It’s the need for something, something so generic and so specific at the same time it’s completely absurd and renders me inarticulate.
It’s a terrible want that I can’t kick. A want I’ve never had before so I don’t know how to kick it, really.
Anger is easy. I’ve learned to calm my anger. I’ve become quite an expert at completely suppressing it for someone else’s emotional well being. Frustration is not so easy, but putting frustration aside is a daily exercise when you are chronically poor and have a toddler. Wanting material things is easy to kick. Wanting a lot of things is easy to kick.
It’s easy to kick things you have similar experiences with… but how do you kick a feeling you’ve never had?
Wanting something you can’t even identify. Something so imbedded in your core it makes you physically ill. It’s torturous to see shadows and glimpses of this something, but it never comes fully to light. The ache, the want, just hiding around the bend and under a rock. Just out of reach. Just out of sight. But pulsing, and radiating, and letting you know that it’s there and that you are missing it.
In the mean time, I’ll bury myself in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and see if I can put it off for another night.
Papyrus – truly a thriller
Title: Papyrus
Author: John Oehler
Genre: Suspense, Historical Fiction
Length: 326 pages
I’ve wanted to read this book since the second I saw its cover. Mainly because John Oehler wrote it and I really enjoy his writing. I read and reviewed Aphrodesia awhile back and I swear I blushed for a month, so I knew Oehler’s writing was phenomenal. Add my obsession for all things Egyptian, and I was completely sold.
Many times this level of anticipation won’t work out well for a reader. There’s too much pressure on the book. How could it possibly live up?
Papyrus took my expectations in stride and out did itself.
Historical fiction all the way, there are still two different timelines – the ancient past (the 18th Dynasty of Egypt) and the not so ancient past (1977, during the war between Eritrea and Ethiopa). I enjoyed the banter and flirtation between these timelines and the story. It was woven together well and never missed a beat or left the reader feeling out of sorts with the rhythm of the tale.
In 1977, Oehler’s Rika Teferi is both a scholar and a warrior of Eritrea. This was an attribute so enticing for my black belt and book nerdy self that I spent two hours in a local Starbucks devouring this book instead of watching the Broncos beat the Patriots on Sunday. I loved her for her strength, her beauty, and ultimately for her intelligence.
Dive into ancient Egypt and Queen Tiye is completely riveting, especially since most my academic studies have focused on Hatshepsut and Nefertiti. It was refreshing to have Akhenaten’s mother be the focus, as I don’t think she is as common a fictional pursuit as other Eqyptian Queens. (The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Pauline Gedge’s The Twelfth Transforming – also stellar writing, but I was apparently so disappointed with the story it seems I have given that title away.) I do not own any nonfiction work devoted primarily to Tiye either, but Oehler’s version of her offered a pretty tempting reason to go find some.
As always Oehler handles the story arch with such grace and ease – I am jealous. He writes stories where things happen. Not just anything, but powerful and exciting things. Foreign countries, different times, bombs, planes, diplomats, ancient manuscripts, tombs, revolutionaries, romance…! His books are award winners with good reason and he is one of Houston’s best kept secrets. It is amazing to me that this was Oehler’s first novel.
February 2014 Events!
Stores and coordinators take a little bit of a break from extra events around the winter solstice holidays and let the holidays be the holidays. But it’s a new year! Here’s to February 2014.
We are going to home school our kids, but that’s only because we hate education
I love this guy. I also love homeschooling my own little person.
First, I’d like to treat you to a look at a few snippets of some emails I received yesterday, after a certain “controversial” segment on my show:
“I never realized you were so anti-education…”
“It figures that a teabagger would hate education so much…”
“….so it seems you would rather have a nation full of illiterates…”
“….I get tired of your anarchist propaganda…”
“I’m sure Hitler would be very proud of you…”
That last one — the obligatory “you’re as bad as Hitler!” charge — is especially ironic, considering the subject that prompted these responses: public education. Specifically, my belief that government education is an unmitigated disaster, and can only be remedied by more and more families deciding to remove government from the equation and educate their children themselves. That last emailer is, predictably, a proud product of public school. But you already knew that, in light of his hilarious…
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A Tidbit from Miss Golightly
I was made for yellow tea sets, books about books and the people who read and write them, brown branches, painted bookshelves, brightly colored rugs and papasan chairs, and rooms filled with sunlight. The afternoon hours of today in Dallas, TX are sublime. – Jennifer Joy Golightly
Get Me Out of Here
Title: Get Me Out of Here
Author: Rachel Reiland
Genre: Memoir/ Psychology
Length: 447 pages
There was no hope for this book – it is so fascinating and so full of raw heart and soul of a person and her mental illness – my copy is obliterated with underlines and notes in margins. I read all 447 pages in less than a 12 hour period, without shirking my life responsibilities, and gave it a five star rating. I recommend it to anyone trying to understand the inner workings of a mentally ill brain.
“One of the saddest facts isn’t that there is still a child within you but that you’re so ashamed of that child. What’s even sadder is that you have always been ashamed of that child, even when you were one.” – pg. 141
Lacuna
Title: The Lacuna
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
lacuna
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n.noun
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An empty space or a missing part; a gap.
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A cavity, space, or depression, (Biology) in a bone, containing cartilage or bone cells.
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: a blank space or a missing part : gap <the evident lacunae in his story — Shirley Hazzard>; also : deficiency 1 <despite all these lacunae, those reforms were a vast improvement — New Republic>
- (Printing, Lithography & Bookbinding) a gap or space, esp in a book or manuscript
- (Architecture) another name for coffer; an ornamental sunken panel in a ceiling or dome
- sheet that forms a distinct (usually flat and rectangular) section or component of something
- hiatus
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Origin: L, a ditch, hole, pool from lacus: see lake
Barbara Kingsolver’s work embodies and embraces nearly all these definitions in some way or another. It’s really quite brilliant, although not nearly as riveting as the concept itself.
Whereas The Poisonwood Bible was completely riveting, but I was far less intrigued by the concept. Funny how that happens. I love Kingsolver, I think she’s a genius. She has managed two completely different reading experiences in one career and I only hope that I could accomplish that one day. With Poisonwood Bible, I was captivated by the place, the drama, her ability to tell a story from five completely distinct voices. I could not stop reading, could not wait to get back to the story.
The Lacuna put me to sleep. Honestly. But it’s not a terrible book. To be fair, I was tired – really tired – this week. When I read books like this, I often think of that quote at the end of Fight Club, “You met me at a very strange time in my life,” I want to tell the book. A time when everything simultaneously puts me to sleep and keeps me awake at night. On top of that, I was totally distracted by the concept. I would start reading and instead of getting lost in the story I’d get lost in my thoughts about the story. I’d soak in every nuance of the word lacuna and sit and pick apart every aspect of how that word is tied to MY story – MY life.
“What do you know about love?”
“Nothing, apparently. That it winks on and off like an electric bulb.”
– pg. 184
Those lines hit me pretty hard. There’s the honest truth of so much about the world right there. At least for me, I see it so truthfully. Love is like a light bulb to me – a choice – you click it on and click it off. You decide to love someone in a moment, or not. I’ve talked about this endlessly in other posts, I’m sure. I think it fascinates me so completely because how I feel and think about love is so unaligned with how those around me feel and think about it. While contemplating this word and this story and this quote I remember noting a conversation with someone I had a little over ten years ago. He had not had a romantic feeling about a girl all day and considered this a triumph. It baffled me, as I had not had a romantic feeling about a person in possibly a month or more. When romantic feelings came to me they always overwhelmed me in their suddenness, the complete surprise of it throws me all the time, because I don’t have them often. I’m not saying romantic thoughts – I love my husband, have loved him for 15 years – but the *feelings* (not the butterflies or the goosebumps as related to physical feelings, but the emotional ones) I don’t have much. Explaining this is difficult and often leaves me faced with strange looks. I consider myself a passionate person who loves deeply and loyally, but have often been told how cold and void of compassion I can be. I understand both descriptions of my personality because when I do feel, it is a strong sense of emptiness. I feel a deep hole in my soul – like a lacuna.
Kingsolver has a way with moving you to re-evaluate your entire existence in one sentence over and over again in a book – in a way that writers strive to do just once in their lives. If I write one excellent sentence that moves someone, I will have considered myself accomplished. So here is another favorite from the beautifully quotable Kingsolver:
“This is what is means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move altogether. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.” – pg. 185
I kept saying the word lacuna over and over in my head. Lacuna, lacuna, lacuna… over and over I let it slip seductively off my mental tongue – while I read, while I did house work, while I slept. I dreamed about it. Not the story, not the setting, but the word. I dreamed about the idea.
“[Y]ou can’t really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece: the birthday like an invisible pinata hanging great and silent over his head, as he stands in his slippers boiling the water for coffee. The scarred, shrunken leg hidden under a green silk dress. A wife and son back in France. Something you never knew. That is the heart of the story.” – pg. 325
I’m a little bit in love with the word, and yes, with the feeling of the word. Thank you Barbara Kingsolver for defining this word oh so eloquently in 507 pages.
I Love Dirt!
Title: I Love Dirt!
Author: Jennifer Ward
Foreword: Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods
Illustratator: Susie Ghahremani
I popped in at Half Price Books after a long season off from scheduling book signings. Tucked low in my employee cube was a book – this book – with a post it note on it from my boss.
“Andi – I thought you might like because of the woods you live by!”
I did like it, immediately. And bought it with my Christmas money.
The book starts with a riveting foreword about the nature of nature in the United States and how much we have strayed from the outdoors. Interestingly enough, the more we stray from outdoor life, the more children struggle with obesity, ADD and ADHD, as well as depression.
And the more kids spend outdoors?
“A 2005 study by the California Department of Education found that students in schools with nature immersion programs performed 27 percent better in science testing than kids in traditional class settings. Similarly, children who attended outdoor classrooms showed substantially improved test scores, particularly in science. Such research consistently confirms what our great-grandparents instinctively knew to be true, and what we know in our bones and nerves to be right: free-play in natural settings is good for a child’s mental and physical health. The American Academy of Pediatrics agrees, stating in 2007 that free and unstructured play is healthy and essential for children.”
I’m in love with this book. I already do a lot of nature activities with my child – foraging for starters. We play outside at the public park, we walk nature trails, we run, we jump, do cartwheels in the grass, hunt insects and lizards, sword fight with sticks, and sing our ABCs at the tops of our lungs by the creek. As Ward states in her introduction, “There is nothing more joyful and inspiring to watch than children discovering the world around them.”
All of the activities in this book are pretty much cost free. The only one I found that requires any kind of purchase is the bird feeding one, and that’s only if you want to do it big and don’t have spare groceries in your house. The activities are simple, like sprinkling orange peels in your yard or covering pine cones with peanut butter and bird seed to bird watch from inside when it is too cold to be outside.
The book is broken up seasonally, so you can hop in and do something no matter when you pick up the book. Each activity has a prompt or a concept to get your child thinking about the activity and world itself.
Blood Myth – A Book Review
from Guest Blogger Angelina JoiAnn
Title: Blood Myth
Author: Stacy Moran
I did not know there was a glossary at the end of the book because I tend to just jump into books… I don’t even read the back cover. So at first it took me awhile to understand what was going on. (Words of Wisdom = Read the glossary first)
It was very interesting and unique. I enjoyed the dom/sub relationship, the broken past that Zakan had and dealt with, and the passion. While reading my kept going back to Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. The mystical parts with witches and shape shifters, “little rabbit” blood and gore took my mind to the Anita Blake series by Laurel K. Hamilton. (If you like those books, you’ll like this one)
There is definitely a lot going on in this book. Not just the dominate/ submissive relationship, but good vs. evil, sex, violence, drama, myth, family history, and more.
It took some time for me to wrap my head around everything that was happening, but it did end with a decent shock. And the best way I could describe Blood Myth is “interesting.”
Homeschooling Schmomeschooling
One thing I know I’ve done is slack off on my homeschooling posts. Some of you may be relieved by that as you follow this for adult book reviews. However, this is something I plan to be more consistent about in the year 2014 (what’s a new year without resolutions to fail at?). So, I’ll start with our wonderful Christmas gifts and how that has altered our January plans for the better.
Series Title:The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library
Title: There’s a Map on My Lap!
With her birthday money, kiddo picked out and purchased Oh Say Can You Seed? (All about flowering plants) and If I Ran the Rain Forest (All about tropical rain forests). I was so proud of my three year old, she picked them out herself without being swayed by me and she continues to select them to be read at bed time – obviously not swayed by me because bed time is when I want to read the shortest book possible.
Each one of these books includes all sorts of information, new vocabulary words, and everything a kid needs to know to get started with that particular topic. There’s even a handy glossary at the end that could later serve as a spelling word list.
So when we saw There’s a Map on My Lap we were pretty excited. And when Grandmom got her a Wall Map too – well, it was all over. We have been having ‘map time’ every chance we get.
Title: Magic Tree House
Author: Mary Pope Osborne
We did a pretty extensive Titanic unit awhile back. We read both Magic Tree House books as well as a few of those early reader books. There was a picture book we tackled, and we even found a replica of an old newspaper page from the day the Titanic sunk.
Kiddo likes history and really likes boats and ships. She built our very own Titanic out of play dough one day, which was pretty exciting.
I will not have a kid that watches the Leonardo DiCaprio movie at 16 and says, “I didn’t know that was REAL!” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/titanic-tweets-some-say-they-didnt-know-titanic-wasnt-just-a-film/2012/04/10/gIQA8fZY8S_story.html).
Even though I’m not a big fan of the movie and what it has to say morally, I can’t wait for Kiddo to see it – even if it means me letting her watch it at a younger age and fast forwarding through the inappropriate parts (you know, the ones that made the film PG-13) – because seeing the ship in all its glory is a phenomenal experience. Already, she enjoys looking at diagrams of how the ship was set up and pictures that were taken. We liked this National Geographic list and pictures too: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/history/10-cool-things-about-the-titanic/
Other Projects…
Christmas was kind to us in regards to school projects. Already we have started the year off by growing rock crystals of our very own.
This was more of a lesson in patience than anything else. She thought the science lesson was cool, but really it was about learning to go check on it every hour on the hour and how long an hour was.
We’re pretty excited about 2014 and what it has in store for us. Kiddo turns four in October and we have so many fun things to do before then.
Anakalian Whims 