Post 489: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Soulles by Gail Carriger. ISBN: 9780316056632.

I found this novel refreshing in its portrayal of vampires and werewolves.  It was something akin to what I 'grew up on' regarding those two genres.  The idea at the bottom is that these supernatural beings are people first, monsters second.  Sure, werewolves completely lose control of their higher brain functions during the full moon and would just as soon tear you apart as look at you, and sure vampires still need blood to survive, but these, shall we say, defects do not prevent them from fitting in with civilized society.

When I say I 'grew up on' vampires and werewolves, I'm talking about two years at the end of high school, so I wasn't exactly a little kid.  One October, my friend James said, "Dan, you're coming to Game with us," and there was simply no saying otherwise.  I was introduced to White Wolf's World of Darkness live-action roleplaying games, specifically Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse.  Friday nights, I would gather on campus with about thirty other people and we would run around with character sheets in our back pockets, playing make-believe that we were bloodthirsty, if angsty, creatures of the night.

I have no delusions that this was a terribly fulfilling way to spend my Friday nights, of course, but it was a lot of fun at the time, and perhaps more importantly, White Wolf's take on supernatural horror has colored my perceptions of them ever since.  When it comes to werewolves, I'm simply a werewolf fan.  I go to movies to get a good transformation scene and cheer on the puppies, whether they're ripping people apart or trying to save the world.

Portrayals of vampires tend to irritate me more.  Mindless, killable leeches are not interesting, and mopey uber-goths are annoying.  There seems to be little deviation in mainstream media from these two tropes, Twilight aside.  Those who hide out in the shadows tend to moan about how the world hates them, and they're monsters who must feed on others, and they never wanted this curse, blah blah blah.  Me?  I always thought there would be at least something enjoyable about being bitten by one of these guys.  I mean, it can't be all doom and gloom and what have I become, right?

Vampire and Werewolf, the games, were always about being people first, who had cool powers.  Sure, we didn't want any normal people to find out what we really were, but that was because they all feared us.  Werewolves and vampires were misunderstood, and the fearful, destructive humans would just try to kill us all, like they did in the Dark Ages!  Was this marketed towards outcast teenagers who got off on feeling like special snowflakes who could rip the heads off their tormentors?  Absolutely.  But that doesn't change the fact that World of Darkness really did focus on the humanity of the supernatural monster, even if it was quickly slipping away in the night. 

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He is currently the editor of Lib's LIB.

LibsNote: Dan was reading a personal copy of the book.
*This post was originally written March 15, 2011 to give the regular blogger a break.  She finally got around to using it after being sleep deprived for 3 days in a row. Yeah.

Post 471: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

The Book of Tomorrow, by Cecilia Ahern. ISBN: 9780061706301.

Our narrator almost redeems herself right off the bat by telling us that she realizes now, cast out of her previous, glamorous life into relative squalor in the countryside, that when she was living in a huge mansion with all the stuff she could ever want, she was pretty much an insufferable, spoiled brat. That redemption didn't pan out for me in reading the book, but at least it gives me a jumping-off point to talk about the one thing that gets me angrier than anything else: economic inequality.

The tl;dr is: I hate rich people. I kind of can't help it. Racism, sexism, oppression, environmental destruction; they don't get under my collar nearly as much as someone suggesting that anyone at all can solve their problems with money. I encountered this a lot in college, and the worst part is, I don't think that these people do this to be mean. They're thoughtless, yes, selfish perhaps, but they simply are ignorant of the problems that people without a lot of money have to face. Things like, "I can't get that book for my class because I have to feed myself this week." And that lack of malevolence is the hardest part, because you can't hate someone for not knowing. For not trying, yes, but first you have to educate.

Unfortunately, no one's doing the education. Rich kids get brought up in gated communities and private schools with other rich kids. They never have to go anywhere outside their little spheres of money because everything is provided for them. When they grow up, they expect everything to be provided for them because that's just how they were brought up. It takes a serious wake-up call to break someone out of that mindset.

This is what I say to people when they suggest things like, "We shouldn't overtax the rich because they made that money and they deserve it." Well, when mommy and daddy buy them everything all their life and they just inherit the money, do they really deserve it? Someone on a message board cheesed me off big time once by suggesting that, yes, they do, because they "carry on the family name." Ignoring the fact that only sons would be worthy of such an inheritance, I found that statement unspeakably ridiculous. Carry on a family name? So they get rewarded for simply being born? No one cares what your name is if you lose everything and wind up on the street. The American dream is not to be born into a wealthy family, but to build an empire and become rich through hard work and dedication.

Of course, the American dream is dead. It's a myth at this point, and its perpetuation just leads people to set their dreams high and suffer disappointment as they crumble. We may all be created equal(ly), but that doesn't mean we all have equal opportunities. The circumstances you grow up in are the ones you're most likely to stay in. We like focusing on the success stories, the people who rise from nothing to become these famous stars or lead multimillion dollar corporations, but they stand out because they're the exceptions. For every one of those people are hundreds of thousands more who are in the ghetto, who will have kids who stay in the ghetto, and the cycle will continue.

And that's what's always made me so angry, I think. My family was working-class, not so poor that we couldn't afford to have nice things every once in a while, but often living above our means and too poor to do things like save money or buy really nice things, like say, extra cars. And now here I am, stuck in a crap, dead-end job that just barely pays enough for me to make payments on my student loans, with no real out in sight, while some bimbo who can't be arsed to remember her teacher's name is going to go through college -- paid for by mommy and daddy -- go into business and make a ton of money while never having to lift a finger. Yeah, I think that would make anyone a little mad.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no way around this except to make these people go from ignoring the poor to hating them. I'm a big proponent of wealth distribution, but honestly, I don't think that goes far enough. I want to see salary caps. No one really needs to make more than $100k, as far as I'm concerned, maybe $200k if I'm feeling generous. Because, yeah, I'm sure running an entire company is hard work, assuming you're actually doing some kind of work, but you sure as hell don't deserve hundreds of millions of dollars a year (plus multimillion bonuses!) for working your slaves to death and exploiting everyone you can lay your hands on just so a room full of rich stockholders can get richer.

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He is currently the editor of Lib's LIB

LibsNote: This post was originally written January 30, 2011 to give the regular blogger a break. 
Dan Walker received a review copy from the FirstReads program at Goodreads.
This was posted late because I totally planned to get something written, but SHIT HAS HAPPENED that needed taking care of. Should be back next week.

Post 470: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok. ISBN: 9781594487569 (advanced reader copy).

The whole illegal immigrant debate is still raging in this country, and if there's one thing that really gets under my nerves, it's a single phrase that keeps being repeated by those who are seemingly anti-immigrant: "They should learn English!"

There is, frankly, a war on foreign language going on right now. I keep reading anecdotes of Americans being offended by the fact that others are speaking languages that are not English around them. This is completely ludicrous. Worse are the related movements trying to keep government documents and voting ballots from being printed in anything but English. Should immigrants learn English? I would say yes; I certainly wouldn't want to live in a country where I couldn't understand the predominant tongue. But the one thing that these people do not understand is that it takes a lot of time to learn a language.

This is one thing I really liked about Girl in Translation, is that we get to see the parallel language development of Kim and her mother. They emigrate from Hong Kong speaking very little English; by the middle of high school, Kim is talking like a native speaker and still has to translate for her mother. Her mother tries learning English around that time, so she can take the naturalization test, but it's a real struggle. I don't know if she actually passes the test, but at the end of the book, she's still not speaking it very well.

The struggles of immigrants to learn English if they've had little or no training in it in their home country are really poorly understood here. Even if they've learned English already, a second-language setting does not provide the cultural context and constant immersion in the second language necessary for someone to really be able to function in a society that speaks that language. Plus, there's cultural shock, differences in body language and inflection that are not always taught, and things like having learned British English and then trying to survive in America. So shouldn't we throw these people a bone, so they can function in their native tongue while they're still learning, especially considering that it's much harder for adults to learn languages than it is for children? Isn't it more important to make sure that people have their civil rights properly explained to them than to push an agenda of "our language or the highway"?

I think for those with the latter sentiment, their viewpoint comes from a lack of understanding and sympathy. This comes directly from the piss-poor status foreign languages hold in the US. For most Americans, foreign language class is something to be tolerated for two years during high school, and maybe another two years in college to satisfy liberal education requirements. They have no need to get anything but a passing grade because even if they go to another country, "Everyone speaks English anyway." This isn't necessarily untrue, but the fact is, few appreciate the cultural understanding that can stem from a serious study of a language, and that lack of seriousness leads to a lack of understanding about how hard learning a language can be (not to mention, they learned theirs while their minds were still plastic enough to absorb it all).

With our current focus on math and science education, I'm sure foreign language is going to continue to fall by the wayside, and I don't know what could really be done to change cultural views on language. What I will do with these last few sentences is give a little advice to any American who wants to make a language-learning decision that will actually be useful to them. Here are a few good languages to try and learn if you have to learn any:

• American Sign Language. No, it's not just making hand gestures to substitute for English words. ASL has its own grammar, which can be bizarre and complex to someone who's only familiar with English. Even if you never leave the United States, ASL is the one language that will most benefit you at home. You will always encounter people who can't hear very well or at all, and there is always a need for interpreters.
• Spanish. Kind of a no-brainer, and another "I don't want to leave the country" language. The importance of Spanish is of course increased the further West one travels.
• French. Less important, but hey, maybe you'll go to Canada one day. There are even places like Louisiana and Maine where people still speak French. French can also teach you a lot about English, because we've got a TON of French loanwords.
• Mandarin Chinese. Now we're in the category of "useful for business." A billion+ people speak Chinese, and Mandarin is the prevalent dialect. If you're going into something like international affairs or business, this is an A-1 doubleplus good choice for a language. It's hard to read, sure, and sometimes hard to understand, but the grammar is easy at least. I don't know much about Cantonese, but it's another good choice (and completely different from Mandarin, despite being called a 'dialect').
• Latin. Some consider it a cop-out, since it's a dead language and all, but it's amazing how much you can learn about English from another language, just like with French. Latin formed about half the building blocks of English, and it's still very useful in the sciences.
• Arabic. Duh. No language right now can get you employed faster. I'm pretty sure the government even has programs where they'll pay for you to learn Arabic so you can be a translator.

So there's a sampling. Just remember, learning another language is far easier when you're well acquainted with your own, so pay attention in grammar class!

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He is the current editor of Lib's LIB. 

*This post was originally written December 9, 2010 to allow the regular author a break and/or a chance to catch up on her own reading. Because A Clash of Kings is a long ass book, okay, guys?
**Danny received the ARC from me, I received it from my public library and they g0t it directly from publishers.

You can see Amy's thoughts on A Girl in Translation here.

Post 361: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know by Heather Sellers. ISBN: 9781594487736.

One of my ex-girlfriend's friends has prosopagnosia, and meeting her was when I first became aware of the illness. Of course, being me, I immediately began to wonder if I had it. I've come to the conclusion that I don't, but I do feel like I have a hard time remembering people's faces.

In high school, I used to be able to recognize anyone by looking at their back. I don't know how I did it, but hair, clothing, height and weight were much easier traits to use in noticing someone in the halls. Maybe it didn't help that I grew to be six-foot-four, and most faces were below my field of vision. I don't think I do this to quite the same extreme anymore, and I have to wonder how I kept such a running catalog of everyone's back.

Lately, I have had opportunities to reflect on my problems with faces. At my workplace, I've been tasked with keeping track of the parking lot, which means I see a lot of the same people every day. I apparently have an amazing talent for recognizing license plates (we keep track of the people who don't pay us by the end of the day), but when it comes to people, it seems to take forever for me to be able to recognize them.

One girl in particular comes in all the time and tends to stay later than she's supposed to, so we make arrangements for her with the towing company. The only way I ever recognize her is by her license plate, which is a vanity plate and thus easy to remember. It's easier to tell who she is when she's wearing sunglasses, because that's how she looked when I first met her, but even then it takes a while for me to figure out who I'm talking to. The fact is, she looks too much like every other white, preppy, lightly tanned girl with perfect skin that I've ever seen.

There's a second side to this issue, though. I'm measuring my ability to recognize other people versus their ability to recognize me before I recognize them. The fact is, my face is pretty unique, and it could just be that I'm far more memorable than most, because ain't nobody else looks like me.

I got to thinking about this due to the part of the book where the author starts telling people about her prosopagnosia. A lot of people didn't believe her, and her psychiatrist told her that was because they wanted to believe that they were unique enough to be memorable. I find this funny, because, brother, you don't want to be unique, take it from me. I can't ever get away with anything, because if anyone sees my face, they'll remember it. Not to mention I'm pretty creepy looking (as Amy will tell you), so I can't do things like offer candy to my customers the way another of the parking lot attendants does. She's a kindly, grandmotherly type, but I'm more of the "Would you like some candy little girl? It's in the back of my black-windowed van" type. At least, that's what my face is.

So, yeah, having someone not recognize you can kind of be a blow to the old ego. But be careful what you wish for; sometimes anonymity is a thing to be revelled in.

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday.


LibsNote: Copy won from Goodreads Giveaway program.
*This post was originally written October 30, 2010 to give the regular blogger a break.Yeah, it's taking me awhile to read The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Post 360: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know by Heather Sellers. ISBN: 9781594487736.

About 30 pages into this book, I said to myself, "Goddamn everyone in this woman's life has mental illness of some kind!" Her mother is the best example; she suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. I couldn't help but compare the woman to my ex-girlfriend's mother, who I had the "pleasure" of meeting one weekend around Thanksgiving.

I wouldn't go so far as to say she's paranoid schizophrenic, but she definitely has some problems. She drove us to her house up north, a trip that took twice as long as it should have because she refused to use highways. Everything was backroads, 5 MPH under the speed limit. She just seemed to be scared of everything (including me, which was kind of amusing), and it really made me pity her. What must life be like, when you're constantly holding back because of fear?

Well, it's actually really hypocritical of me to be asking that, because I've always held back because of fear, mostly fear of failure. I will tend not to do things if I don't think I can get them right the first time, or if I don't think I'll thoroughly enjoy myself. When I saw my ex's mother's driving habits, I told myself I wasn't going to be like her, but unfortunately, I am. Amy's been helping me take more chances, but when you've had a lifetime of acting a certain way, it's hard to break the habit.

And that's all a set of fear-based behaviors like that is: a habit. When your rituals keep you safe -- you haven't come to any harm in doing them, after all -- the need for doing them is reinforced. When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of time worrying myself sick, because I thought that, magically, it would affect things that I really had no control over, like the weather. I have even battled bouts of my own paranoia. Most recently, I would spend hours lying awake at night, absolutely certain that every creak I could hear in the house meant that someone had broken in. I would get up and grab the sword I keep under my bed (it's never been sharpened) and stalk down the stairs very slowly, only to find that nothing had changed since I'd gone to bed. This is actually apparently something I get from my mother, who will have periods where she has to get up in the middle of the night and check to make sure the doors and windows are locked. I finally put an end to it by sleeping with a fan running, even in winter, so that I can't hear anything.

Fear is a great motivator, but like all things, it's best in moderation. It's one thing to lock your windows at night, but you cross the line when you start nailing them shut.

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

LibsNote: Copy won from Goodreads Giveaway program.
*This post was originally written October 30, 2010 to give the regular blogger a break.Yeah, it's taking me awhile to read The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Post 345: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation by Steve Stanton.  ISBN: 9781550229547.

There's a scene at the very end of the book where the main characters are chopping down a tree. This is in no way going to spoil the plot, by the way, because it has absolutely nothing to do with anything. You don't expect trees in cyberpunk novels. But this scene got me nostalgic for my younger days, cutting down trees in my grandparents' backyard.

My paternal grandparents owned two acres more or less at the edge of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park (a wonderful place, by the way, if you like parks). Their backyard was four times as long as it was wide, and sloped down the entire way into a series of two tiers. The first tier was just normal lawn, but as the ground gave way toward the rearmost part, the trees sprung up everywhere, and the land turned marshy. Every year or two, my entire extended family would get together to chop down trees in the marshy area and have a bonfire.

These were not mere saplings, either; everything back there was full grown and had been around forever. We went after diseased trees first (I recall the willows in particular didn't last long), but eventually it just became a ritual to take out something that grandma and grandpa didn't want there.

We would make a day of it, usually playing bocce or croquet (with wickets set so that you had to really whack those balls uphill to get through them*) before getting to the dirty work. Then out would come the chainsaws and hand saws, the work gloves, the riding mower and its wagon hitch. I was allowed to drive it when I got old enough, but mostly I just enjoyed riding around in it.

Our target chosen, the adults would set about making cuts in the trunk to weaken it enough that it would fall. Picking the right direction was imperative, to keep it from flattening any of us or getting tangled up in shorter trees.  Invariably, one or two would be stubborn and refuse to topple despite the constant cutting, which was always hilarious.  We rooted for the designated lumberjack, who was on a razor's edge, ready to run the moment the trunk started to give.  Then would come the unmistakable sound of a falling tree: a crack, a groan and the endless crashing as it toppled to the ground. Twigs snapped, bark ripped, large limbs sometimes buried themselves deep into the mud.

Felling a tree is an amazing experience. Suddenly, the sky has changed, you can see more of it. The tree's shadow is gone, the area brightens up. There is an incredible, primordial stillness that settles around the death of a tree. I remember the pungent smell of freshly exposed wood, and being covered in saw dust and wood chips. If we were felling a maple, sometimes we would sample the sweet sap, although that too was full of sawdust and wood chips. I would stand on the horizontal trunk and walk its length, even if I was small enough that I needed dad's help getting up and down, and take stock of fungal infestations, insect colonies, and odd formations in the bark.

Chopping the tree up was where everyone was able to pitch in, either sawing or trimming off smaller branches, or carting the brush and logs around with the mower. Of course, most of the behemoth would be destined for the bonfire, which we liked to build high and burn long into the night. We would roast hot dogs and marshmallows and have a great time, going home smelling like wood smoke, a scent I still love to this day.

Lately, I've been having some weird ideas about trees, admiring them in, well, a tree-hugging sort of way. We tend to think of them as simply part of the scenery, and I sort of understand why: contemplating each of these monsters as a living being is kind of mind-blowing. They've been around for decades, often centuries. They were here before we were, they'll be here after we're done. They don't care about a whole lot; they just sort of hang out and try to get as much of the good stuff as they can. Killing one is sort of a travesty, even if one intends to use a tree for something constructive or if it was suffering from disease. Still, cutting a tree down with your bare hands is one of the most primal things a person can do, a perfect example of humankind's power over nature. I imagine we felt only a smidgen of what the American settlers did, as they cut through swaths of forest to build and heat their homes on the frontier. I consider it a way of communing with nature, of participating in the end cycle of life, and I recommend everyone try it if they have a chance.**

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

***This post was originally written March 1, 2011 to give the regular blogger a chance to recover from a horrendous cold.

LibsNote: I received an ARC directly from the publisher and passed it on to Dan. My posts about the book are here.
*That's what she said.
**Preferably with purpose, LibsLIB does not condone random acts of tree mauling.

Post 341: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. ISBN: 9781608191666.

I've never known how to feel about unions. I've come to regard them as a double-edged sword, though perhaps one that is past its prime. It's inarguable that they were absolutely necessary back around the turn of the century. Working conditions were inhumanly deplorable and unions were the workers' only way to stand up against the elites who were holding them down. So once upon a time, unions were the only savior of the lower classes.

But nowadays, it seems that unions have grown huge and bloated, taking on the trappings of the corporations they once fought against, looking out only for their own bottom lines. They prevent employers from firing bad employees, they try to squeeze all the money out of corporations that they possibly can, whether it's best for the industry or not. Just look at UAW and the auto industry right now. In some industries (I think of Hollywood, mostly), you can't get a job without joining the union and paying their dues, however high and regardless of skill. How is someone supposed to pay dues when they haven't even gotten a paycheck? The rights the unions once fought for are now enshrined in national and state laws; what, then, is their purpose?

Really, it just seems like the corporate squeezing I mentioned is about the end of it. I worked at a college bookstore once, a national chain, that had one in-store union employee. There wasn't any option for the rest of us to join, I don't think. All that really seemed different about her was that she got extra breaks and the managers tended not to yell at her. That said, I doubt my father would be employed if not for the letter carriers' union he belongs to. The US Postal Service is a pretty shitty business to work for, and the union is often the only thing standing up for workers' rights. So, in certain cases, they seem to have a function still, but otherwise...

Well, that pretty much sums up my view as of two days before this writing. I now have a slightly improved viewpoint of the situation thanks to this book. I'm going to copy the passage that changed my mind here. For context, the author has just finished discussing what happens to unemployed workers in Europe.

"...if you are a worker in the US, you'd better make sure you hold on to your current job, if necessary through protectionism, because losing your job means losing almost everything. Unemployment insurance coverage is patchy and of shorter duration than in Europe. There is little public help with retraining and job search...losing your job means losing your health insurance and probably your home... As a result, worker resistance to any industrial restructuring that involves job cuts is much greater in the US than in Europe. Most US workers are unable to put up an organized resistance, but those who can -- unionized workers -- will, understandably, do everything they can to preserve the current job distribution." (pp. 226-7)

If you lose your job in Europe, you can get unemployment and even retraining if need be. In the US, you're pretty much finished, so of course workers who can resist will. It goes beyond the "I've got mine, jack" attitude that plagues many in the upper echelons of our society; it really is a struggle between working and being homeless.

So I've come to the conclusion that while some unions may indeed be too powerful, the bad parts of unionization are in fact understandable. It's the system that is to be blamed. Grasping at everything you can is really different when the alternative is having nothing. I just wish I had someone to advocate for me, you know?

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

*This post was originally written February 12, 2011 to allow the regular blogger to play several hours of Zuma's Revenge and spend time with her fiance. Also, this seemed poignant given the events in Wisconsin.

Post 337: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  ISBN: 9780140283334.

This post is going to be equally about the novel and an article that I read recently.  If you read it, make sure you click the two follow-up articles the guy wrote.

What got me thinking about this article in conjunction with the novel was the way the boys treated Piggy.  He's the fat, awkward kid, a serious mama's boy, always speaking his mind to try and get things to work the way he thinks is proper, and so he gets picked on and shunned a lot.  There's a scene where a very tense moment is diffused by someone poking fun at Piggy; it comes off as business as usual, and everyone relaxes.

So, yeah, I was bullied in school, and I won't even begin to guess why.  I remember being laughed at and called names, spit on, and occasionally beaten up on my way to or from school.  That last one was the worst; it didn't happen often, but it did cause me to alter my route to school.  I do hold it accountable for my cynicism, however.

The silly thing is, I never told anyone about anything that happened.  I actually went to great lengths to keep people from finding out what had happened to me.  I can't even begin to understand why I didn't tell anyone.  The best I can guess is that maybe I thought there was something wrong with me and that's why I got picked on all the time.  It's that internalization that keeps bullying something tolerated.  Like the guy in Single Dad Laughing says, the bullied have voices and need to use them.

Still, the treatment I received could have been a lot worse in some ways.  I knew a girl in middle school who was picked on far more publicly, and far more often than I was.  I actually tended to avoid her because she was lower on the social ladder than even me.  Also, the physical abuse I underwent never really did any lasting damage, although I did experience something Single Dad Laughing described, where hot girls would ask me out and then laugh in my face.  That left scars, that have only just recently begun to heal.

It also could have been much worse, because I at least had people to turn to, and I think that's really the most important thing for someone who's being tormented in school.  In high school, I made friends with a bunch of other social outcasts, and we banded together, and we turned our collective ostracized status into something that allowed us to feel better about ourselves.  We didn't need anyone but ourselves, we were better than the 'normals' because we made an effort to be different.  That kind of mindset has sort of warped me for later life, but at the time, it was a most necessary survival mechanism.  My friends gave me a way to be myself, and they gave me something to live for.

I think anything else I could say on the subject is said much better by the article, so I'll just say, if you were holding off on reading it until you finished reading this post, go back and read it now.  It's worth it.

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

*This post was originally written October 16, 2010 to give the regular blogger a break.

Post 336: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  ISBN: 9780140283334.

I first read this book in tenth grade, and I remember really, really liking it until we started to discuss the symbolism (and I know I'm not the only one who felt this way).  What really appealed to me at the time was the surface story: about a bunch of kids having to fend for themselves, living off the land, and forming a society outside the influence of adults, even if it fell apart.

I was really into books like My Side of the Mountain when I was a kid.  I'm not sure what it is about survival stories that's so compelling.  I mean, if I had to go through a situation like that, I'd most likely wind up like Piggy: fat, whiny, ineffectual, striving to maintain decorum, and ultimately, dead.  I'm certainly in no shape for taking care of myself in the wild.  I don't know a whole heck of a lot about cold weather survival, what things to eat, how to hunt...  Like most people, I'm simply not prepared for roughing it.

To be honest, as much as I like visiting parks and forests, I kind of hate being outside.  There are two reasons for this.  The first is the sun.  The sun hates my eyes.  The sun hates my skin.  I don't know that I've ever suntanned, because I usually just turn red and start peeling.  It's unfortunate that we kind of need the sun for living and stuff, because it's really inconvenient.

The second reason is bugs.  Spiders aside, I'm not what you'd call bug-phobic, but I really, really, really hate it when bugs think they can just walk all over me.  There's something about having a bug land on me that makes me react as if I have seen a spider.  I will do anything to avoid coming into contact with most bugs, and I will do anything to get them off of me once they've landed.  I blame mosquitoes for this.

That all said, there is at least one thing that I like about being outside: eating stuff.  I get a serious thrill out of being able to pick fruit outside, whether it's from the blackberry bushes in my backyard, the apple trees at the other end of campus, or that plum tree outside where I work that doesn't produce plums anymore because it's got some kind of disease (when it did produce, they were great).  Even if we're talking something that I've grown, like a carrot, I just find something supremely satisfying about being able to pull something out of the ground, or off a branch, and consume it.

Of course, you have to be careful.  I once tried eating a puffball that was growing in the backyard and boy was that nasty.  I still gag a little when I think about it. 

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

*This post was originally written October 16, 2010 to give the regular blogger a break.

Post 335: Dayna Ingram (guest blogger)

Pariah by Bob Fingerman. ISBN: 9780765326270.

There's a moment very early in this book when a certain character is resting peacefully on the window ledge of an apartment building, inconveniently surrounded by zombies. He chats with his wife, he smokes a cigarette. Oh shit he falls out the window! He becomes a victim first of gravity, then of hungry zombie hordes. This guy right here is totally me if I ever find myself in the midst of a Zombocalypse.

I am the poor sucker who will be killed not by zombies but by my own stupidity, or susceptibility to gravity, which is more or less the same thing. I am the idiot who will avoid being bitten for days, maybe even weeks, and then I'll forget to lock up the garage, or I'll scrape my knee on a rusty nail, or I'll run out into the middle of the street trying to save a stray dog. I'll bust the heads of a writhing, unquenchable mass of gooey, drippy dead dudes, only to trip and fall down a well on my way back to safety. I'll shoot my own undead mother in the noggin' and then step on a live wire that's been downed in a shallow puddle on the sidewalk and go to my grave regretting only that I forgot it had rained or that I forgot how electrocution works.

You read me right. In the event of a Zombie Apocalypse, I would not hesitate to shoot the reanimated corpse of my own dear mother. I guess I'm pretty proud of this inner knowledge. Whatever idiotic things I may do in the quest to not be eaten by my former friends, neighbors and countrymen, I will never die due to a misplaced sense of compassion/empathy/sympathy for my zombified loved ones. Because, as the old adage goes, there's no
OH-SHIT-MY-WIFE'S-A-ZOMBIE-I-CAN'T-POSSIBLY-SHOOT-HER-IN-THE-FACE in SURVIVAL.

Remember that, loved ones. If the Zombocalypse comes, maybe don't beep me.

Dayna Ingram is a writer and student living in the Bay Area. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Antioch College in 2008, and is currently working on her MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She works at Half Price Books, where she buys more books than she can reasonably hope to read in a lifetime.  She is also the author of Sleep Like This.

Dayna's review can be found on Goodreads.
LibsNote: guest blogger did not disclose where she got the book from. Also, I am not a good candidate for saving your or my own ass during the Zombocalypse either. I'm both slow and callous.

Post 318: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Nemesis by Philip Roth.  ISBN: 9780547318356.

One of Bucky's initial points of self-loathing is that his eyesight is too poor for him to be able to fight in World War II.  So his friends ship off to Europe while he's stuck at home, a 4-F minding a playground.  I want to make it clear, this really gets him down.

Me, I don't get that.  I've always believed that going into the military was a death sentence.  That's a bit harsh, of course; it's more like playing Russian roulette, there's just a chance that you'll die.  Personally, I've never wanted to take that chance and I don't understand why people do.

I'm not a big patriot, and I'm certainly no nationalist.  I try to support our troops and all that, but deep down, I think they're all crazy.  As far I can tell, everyone in the military is in some way suicidal.  I cannot find any other way to explain why they would want to go to war, because I'm one of those people who doesn't believe that there is anything worth dying for.

See, when you die, you stop.  Anything that you were fighting for, you can't fight for anymore.  You're useless.  Your potential as anything but fertilizer is zero.  So that's one less person trying to hold off the invaders, one less person who could one day cure cancer or invent the warp drive, one less person to love and care about others.  What's the point in dying for something?  Isn't it better to keep fighting, to keep working toward whatever ideal you stand for?  You certainly can't trust others to do it once you're gone.  We may put a lot of emphasis on last requests, but it's not like there's any kind of binding contract for others to carry out your wishes.

I'm sure I'll get a lot of flak for this, but I don't care.  I guarantee that as much as I don't understand the military viewpoint, those who do won't understand mine.  Call me a coward if you want, that's fine.  I just think this is something that needs to be said, because no one ever seems willing to say it. 

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

LibsNote: This post was originally written October 11, 2010 to give the regular blogger a break. 

Dan borrowed an ARC of Nemesis from me. I received it from a publisher's booth at ALA 2010.

Post 299: Marybeth Cieplinski (guest blogger)

At Home: A Short History of Private Life.  ISBN: 9780767919388 (ARC - published October 5, 2010).

I always wanted to own an old house, even after seeing all the work my dad put into their last one here. It was fun putting up wallpaper, painting, fixing broken pipes. Even bailing icy snow-melt from the basement has charm when you're not the one footing the bill and dealing with the damage. I really should have listened to that old saying -- be careful what you wish for.

The house we bought in 1991 was probably built in the 1880s. According to an elderly neighbor, who was born next door, various parts of the house were built with stolen wood from the lumber yard that was across the street. Having gotten a glimpse inside the walls, I wouldn't bet against it. We live in what is often called a "shotgun house" because a gunman would have a straight line of sight from the back door to the front of the house. The kitchen is the oldest part of the house, with handmade bead-board cabinets that are very similar to the ones in my parents' last house. Those cabinets only fit into one place in the kitchen, obviously built for that spot, so when ductwork was added to send heat upstairs, the cabinets ended up on the enclosed back porch/laundry room, where they reside at this moment. My Dad just happened to be visiting from Florida while we were in the process of getting a loan, so we took him on a tour of our potential new home. While I was enthralled by the paneled crook at the side of the stairs – images of a twinkling Christmas tree there danced through my head – I think Dad was simply appalled. I'm sure he could see the amount of work needed to make it livable, and keep it that way. The stair landing felt spongy when we stepped on it. Termites: in the landing, the two-story wall next to it, and the window that got stranded in mid-wall when the attic floor was knocked out to put in a staircase for bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. Heat was provided by a massive, cast iron gas furnace that had been converted from coal use. The gravity-feed heat system wasted an appalling amount of our money without giving much in the way of warmth, especially to the second floor. The downstairs room off the dining area we euphemistically called the "sewing room" although it was supposed to be a bedroom. Even twenty years ago, the sizing paper over the plaster walls and ceiling was peeling. It hasn't gotten any better and parts of the ceiling came down a few years ago. We screwed drywall scraps over the exposed lath and crossed our fingers that it wouldn't spread. The idea of using it as a full-time bedroom is currently out of the question. In retrospect, we should have sold the house when the kitchen ceiling fell down.

I fell in love with the size of the kitchen. Almost fifteen feet square, there was plenty of room to cook, which we often did as a family. The dining table was situated between the sink and a hutch used for storage. We replaced the pale green 1930s gas stove and refrigerator with modern versions, but the plug for the fridge was inconveniently located on the opposite side of the room, making a too-large work triangle. Odds and ends of furniture (rearranged frequently) held the microwave, pots, and non-perishable foods. Three doors (including one to the side yard next to the sink) and three windows left little space and made positioning the bits of furniture a challenge, but we managed. I frequently wished we could remodel and make things more convenient but we never talked about it seriously. Until the ceiling fell down. There had always been a wrinkled bit of wallpaper in the corner over the fridge, so when the kids said the ceiling was sagging, I dismissed it. A couple weeks later, it was obvious that they were right. My husband decided to screw some slabs of drywall over the sagging section to keep it in place until we could deal with it. The next day, I removed my collection of Depression glass vases from the top of the fridge and the hutch next to it. After supper, my husband set up a ladder and went to get the drill and some drywall screws. Before he could return, there was a sharp ripping noise, and a third of the plaster on the kitchen ceiling came down on top of the fridge, hutch and ladder. We took it as a sign that we should remodel, but there are times when I think we would have been better off selling.

Ironically, my parents' old house went up for sale two years ago. It seemed like a good omen, even though I knew we probably couldn't afford the more-expensive mortgage. Still, I agonized over the possibilities. A lot. Ultimately, we never were able to connect with the realtor for a visit, so maybe that was a sign too. Sometimes I wish we'd looked into buying that house a little harder. More often I'm glad we didn't. I lived in that house for long enough to know what its issues are and I'm sure they haven't improved over the past thirty years either. Then again, there are times when I think I might have enjoyed finding out.

Marybeth Cieplinski is what colleges euphemistically call a "non-traditional student," meaning she's next to older than dirt and just finished her BA in December.  Her immediate plans are to panic while attempting to finish her grad school admissions portfolio by the Feb 1 deadline.  Future plans are subject to change depending on when she gets out of bed in the morning.  She loves to write about almost anything but doesn't know when to stop.

LibsNote: The guest blogger borrowed the book from me, and I received it from the publisher's booth at ALA 2010.

Post 298: Marybeth Cieplinski (guest blogger)

At Home: A Short History of Private Life.  ISBN: 9780767919388 (ARC - published October 5, 2010).

I read small sections of Bill Bryson's At Home propped up in bed before going to sleep, carefully held out of food range while eating meals, in doctors' waiting rooms, while waiting for my college classes to start, and in the bathroom. It's a big book. It's also crammed with so much information I could only read for so long before I had to put it down in order to absorb everything. The bibliography by itself is twenty-five pages! So much information gave me a lot to think about, but mostly it made me look at my own house, and the houses I grew up with, in a different way.

My parents' first house was a three-bedroom ranch that eventually held six people. We had to share the bedrooms and there was only one bathroom, making for cramped quarters. Dad eventually had to build a large family room (with a half bath attached) so we'd have somewhere to play without being underfoot He also built a bar-type counter so we would have more space to eat since there really wasn't a dining room. Within days, my mother had put a series of dents in the surface by trying to crack a jumbo jawbreaker for us. I often wonder if those dents, and the bar itself, are still there.

We only lived in the next house for eighteen months. My parents bought it because Dad had transferred to a new office and this particular house fit our immediate needs. It wasn't any bigger than the last one, though, and it had what is euphemistically called a "postage stamp" yard. If there was more than ten feet of grass on any side of that house I'd be amazed.

Dad hated the short, steeply sloping driveway that was impossible to keep clean in the winter, as well as the challenge of mowing the corresponding hill in the front yard. Mom hated the driveway, the neighborhood, the yard, and the house itself in no particular order. The short galley kitchen was also the entrance to the garage, and the water tasted like rotten eggs. The sunken family room came with a tank of guppies. Mom liked having complimentary fish until she personally experienced the reproductive proclivities of guppies. We left two tanks full for the new owners when we moved out.

My younger sister and I shared a room where we had to sit on the end of the bed in order to open the dresser's drawers. Mom insisted that the twelve foot cathedral ceiling deserved a Christmas tree to fit the space. She forgot we didn't own enough lights, garland or ornaments to decorate such a monster, so we only decorated the most visible area, zigzagging the lights and garland like a picture in a coloring book. Mom was thrilled when we moved, especially after all twelve of the mice in my older brother's science fair project escaped into the laundry room. We recaptured all of them, but it took a month and I don't think she ever viewed the house the same way again.

After that, my family moved to a huge house. Well, it seemed huge to me: three bedrooms with nice-sized closets, two full baths, a big family room with a small attached laundry room, and a dining room big enough for a trestle table and eight chairs. The kitchen had floor-to-ceiling bead-board cabinets and plenty of space to move around. There was an enclosed, finished back porch off the kitchen that eventually became a much larger laundry room. A small open porch off the family room was perfect for enjoying pleasant evenings, until the bats came out of the rafters and chased us inside. The living room had a full-length bay window that was echoed in the bedroom I shared with my sister. We got the largest, to make up for the previous shoebox. It held both a double and twin bed, two nightstands, a chest of drawers and dresser, and eventually at least a hundred wind chimes from my sister's vacations cruises. I loved that room.

The house had been moved from the center of town, a mile down the street, a few years before my parents bought it. The neighbors said they thought it was full of water because the glass in the downstairs windows was blue tinted. Mom did some research over the years and discovered that it was built in 1854 and had originally been a general store. The full-wall bookcase in the living was the store's front window, and the living room doorway was the door into the store itself. Over the years rooms were added on until, by the time it was moved, the trees along the road had to be severely trimmed to let it pass. When the house was lowered onto the new foundation, they found the basement rafters were pointing the same way as the floor joists, instead of at right angles. There was nothing to support the joists, so everything buckled and sagged. None of the floors were ever level again. One of our dogs quickly learned that she could drop a ball at the kitchen end of the dining room and chase it toward the living room. Liquids spilled at the dining table were best mopped up by going to the other end of the room and following the flow back to the source. The basement walls leaked like a fountain -- literally. I never got tired of going to the basement when it rained so I could watch jets of water shoot from the walls.

I lived in that house for seven years (not counting the two when my husband and I had to move back in with the family), and every time I flipped the light switch in my bedroom, there was an audible tinkling of broken plaster falling inside the wall. Bats made occasional forays into the house, thanks to gaps in the plaster between the roof rafters and the walls. One year, a hive of bees took up residence in Mom and Dad's bedroom wall. The humming was loud enough to interfere with television viewing or listening to the radio. The yard was a good two acres: maybe my parents' attempt to make up for the previous postage stamp. I often think fondly about that house. When my parents moved to Florida five years after I got married, I would gladly have bought the house myself if it had been possible.

Marybeth Cieplinski is what colleges euphemistically call a "non-traditional student," meaning she's next to older than dirt and just finished her BA in December.  Her immediate plans are to panic while attempting to finish her grad school admissions portfolio by the Feb 1 deadline.  Future plans are subject to change depending on when she gets out of bed in the morning.  She loves to write about almost anything but doesn't know when to stop.

LibsNote: The guest blogger borrowed the book from me, and I received it from the publisher's booth at ALA 2010.

Post 291: Kyle B. (guest blogger)

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell. ISBN: 978030737870.

So this Bissell guy is kind of a goof. I was hoping he would really get into some of the reasons that video games are important, but I was pretty disappointed. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let the moment go to waste. Let’s take a moment and talk video games in a sort of academic sense, yes?

I’m going to leave aside the economic/sociological issue of the necessity of a healthy gaming culture in a technological society, because that is an Important Thing deserving of its own book. Instead, I’m focusing a bit on what video games have done for us mentally.

Our days are full of decisions, from when to get out of bed to what to eat, to whether or not to send nuclear missiles against Norway. Not all of these decisions are that ponderous, but some change lives. When it comes down to it, we get stressed out by all the choices we have. One of the things that video games (and other diversions) do is provide us with an imaginary escape from that stress.

Most forms of entertainment are strictly guided. A book can only be picked up and put down; a movie really can only be watched one way. The thing that gaming gives us that other recreation can’t is the ability to choose within the experience itself what will happen.

This guided experience, whether in narrative or non-narrative games, is more or less a vicarious life (and probably what Bissell meant by the title Extra Lives). Here, the choices you make are almost always life-changing in one way or another, meaning survival or ruin for the respective avatar, but aside from finding that last great power up or getting a new ending, these choices don’t make a lasting difference in your own life (or, generally a positive one – who continues playing a game that isn’t rewarding to them?). A gamer gets all of the catharsis of making big decisions without the crushing stress of knowing it could destroy everything she’s worked for her whole life. Even in games where a different choice means another playthrough, the only cost is time, if the player is willing to pay that for another catharsis.

When the experience does affect the gamer, it becomes a shared experience with other gamers who have covered the same ground. Maybe different choices were made, different styles of gameplay attempted. The comparison should lead to an even richer discussion between those gamers.

I’m not saying games are the only compelling way to experience entertainment and enrichment (first, I am a writer/reader, so no; second, there are still plenty of games out there that refuse to entertain or enrich), and I’m not even saying that there isn’t a serious danger of allowing directors to corral and restrain our imaginations to the confines of that event. I’m just saying that video games, as art and experience, are important.

Kyle B. is some guy you've never heard of, but he's okay with that. He's a writer and journalist (also both a lover and fighter) that graduated from Kent State University a few years ago, with some slight gainful employment since. He loves to read but pretty much puts a new book back on the shelf if a couple of the first words on the jacket are "murder mystery" or "romance."

GuestNote: I guess Super Smash Bros. Brawl or Pokemon are some I use for stress relief, but there are lots of games out there to choose from. Animal Crossing is a better "relaxing" game, but I used to jam out to Meteos.
LibsNote: In case you were wondering, my favorite stress relief video games consist of Katamari Damacy and variants of Tetris.  Meteos is also pretty awesome. What about you readers?

Post 284: Dayna Ingram (guest blogger)

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell.  ISBN: 9780316057554.

I love when books get adapted into movies, because usually I have never heard of the book being adapted, and I am excited to read it more than I am excited to see the movie. I've discovered wonderful stories this way (White Oleander; Girl, Interrupted), and so I was super excited to read Winter's Bone after I saw a trailer for the independent film. The book is very atmospheric, and sort of noir-ish in its plot, but the characterization of Ree Dolly is what really pulled me through it. She is a literary heroine in the style of Clarice Starling: all vulnerability hidden under a necessarily tough exterior (a little girl trying to survive in a man's world), and her stoicism is quite touching. The complexity of her character is only deepened by her sexual relationship with her best friend Gail.

While this relationship is never made explicit, it is completely there, and very important in how Ree deals with her lot in life. The non-exploitative, nicely subtle way Woodrell handles this relationship is very welcome, allowing the reader to infer its significance and use their own imagination to read between the lines. It's tragic but it's not sensational or overtly sentimental, and of course Ree bares the burden of her desire, like she does all her other unfulfilled desires, with stoic grace. So this relationship surprised me, and made me really excited to see how the movie handled this aspect of the novel. And, of course, the movie completely dropped the entire thing.

Okay, I understand that the film was playing more with the atmosphere of the setting and doing some tonal things and wasn't really focused on character-building as much as the novel was. (In fact, the movie was under whelming and entirely confusing; if I hadn't read the novel beforehand, I don't think I would have understood the plot at all.) They set up the friendship between Ree and Gail but it was never as deep as it was in the novel (even disregarding the sexual nature of the relationship, it was still a very intimate and important friendship that the film ignored). Maybe the relationship is only important to me because, as a gay lady, I yearn for more complex representations of sexual identity and especially women just in general in my books and movies. But I don't think I am alone in seeing this. It's something that I would expect certain readers to go ahead and ignore if it bucked up against their narrow worldviews or fragile identities, but for the screenwriters to ignore it completely? It's almost as outrageous as the Fried Green Tomatoes adaptation, which excised the much more explicit lesbian identity of Idgie Threadgoode entirely from the story.

Listen, I know movies are shorter and therefore must cut certain aspects of stories for purposes of length, but that is not what I see happening here when important aspects of a character are completely shut down. I see screenwriters or producers or studio execs getting scared that they'll offend some throwback sensibility of their oh-so naïve audience by presenting them with “alternative lifestyles,” so rather than develop a complex, whole, individual character, they whittle the character down to their most acceptable/relatable traits (woman-precocious-just-needs-a-good-man; woman-young-headstrong-just-needs-a-good-man).

I'd like to think, in 2011, we've progressed beyond this simplification. I'd like to think, if I want to see lesbians or non-heterosexual ladies on my screen, I don't have to go out and specifically rent a Lesbian Movie (I've seen them all, anyway). I'd like to know what Woodrell thinks about this. I'd like to think I am not the only one who is ranting about this.

Dayna's review can be found on Goodreads.

Dayna Ingram is a writer and student living in the Bay Area. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Antioch College in 2008, and is currently working on her MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She works at Half Price Books, where she buys more books than she can reasonably hope to read in a lifetime.  She is also the author of Sleep Like This.

Day 276: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Watchmen by Alan Moore.  ISBN: 9780930289232.

I picked up on a subtext while reading this through.  In Alan Moore's vision of 1985, World War Three is a specter hanging over everyone's shoulder, and once Russia invades Afghanistan, the shadow of impending armageddon looms heavily over the secondary characters.

It made me wonder how I would handle the end of the world.  Living where I do, it's very unlikely that I'd be hit by an atomic bomb, unless they were being dropped willy-nilly: Cleveland is too far away and Akron really doesn't need to be bombed.  I mean, just look at it.  But fallout, nuclear winds, or nuclear winter would eventually rear their ugly heads and I'd be up shit creek.

So how to take it?  I've always thought that if I knew it was coming, I'd just try and get out and do everything I could before the final curtain call: have sex, eat stuff, go places, see things.  Heck, travelling like that could potentially take me outside a blast radius, to somewhere relatively unaffected by whatever force is currently destroying civilization.

On the other hand, I'd like to think that I'd be one of those people who would knuckle down and prepare for a long haul underground.  By the time the bombs dropped, it would no doubt be too late, but hey, I used to belong to an apocalypse cult, kind of.  But that's a story for another time.

...Or maybe right now.

My friends and I, during my senior year of high school, were obsessed with World of Darkness roleplaying games, the kind that make you run around outside with your arms crossed over your chest shouting words like "Obfuscation!" and "Celerity!" at people desperately clutching their wrists.  Anyway, when other teens were fussing over social status and whether their zits were coming back for prom, we were forming a werewolf pack, which gave a structure to our Big Plan.  One of my friends had had a vision of impending doom that would "change the world as we know it" (we later thought it pertained to 9/11, but hindsight always validates augury), and his plan was to squirrel away books about farming and other knowledge that would be useful in rebuilding a society.  We were going to get in shape and learn all kinds of skills and... whatever, it never worked out and the apocalypse didn't happen until we were out of school anyway.

The point is, that kind of thinking, plus a mile-deep concrete bunker and some seeds and canned food, is all you really need.  That's resourcefulness.  It's also the kind of thing that you pretty much have to be a paranoid conspiracy nut to prepare in time for Ragnarok.  But it's not like the world is gonna end any time soon, right? 

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

LibsNote: Post originally written on October 7, 2010 so the regular author could slog through Bill Bryson's At Home.

Day 265: Kyle B. (guest blogger)

The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody.  ISBN: 9780316118910.

While I was not a huge fan of The Four Fingers of Death, there were a few parts that really spoke to me. Moody’s narrator’s wife dies near the beginning of the book from a disease that slowly kills off her lungs. Near the end of her life, she sinks into a haze, while the narrator struggles to describe by saying there was going to be a “last time,” and that had to be important. That segment tore me apart.

I’ve been witness to some “last times,” and I’d like to talk about them a little bit here, thanks the anonymity afforded me by the Internet.

I was always close to my grandmother as a child. The woman believed in me, if there’s any better way to put it. We shared a lot of things, like a love of books and stories, of questioning things and sorting them out, and food. I think I was probably about 13 or so when she passed away after a long struggle with cancer. The night before she died, I was woken up after midnight by a crowd of people coming to our house. My grandmother, in recognizing how close she was, had gotten as much of our family as she could together so we could be together in those last hours, and she wanted to see all of her grandchildren again before she died, especially me. She hugged me with all of her self.

She brought with her a small box of things about her past; it was as if she wanted to rip back the curtain on who she was as a person before any of us were around, before it was too late to be known. The most distinct part of this memory is a moment when she got out a birthday card she had received years before, and asked me to read off her birthdate from it. Whether it was my being sleepy or what, I couldn’t read it, and I couldn’t remember the date offhand. Her face fell hard, and she held me tight against her, asking how we could care about each other so much and I didn’t know her birthdate. I know I apologized and somehow pulled it out a moment later, but I could see she was afraid that even those people who knew her best didn’t know her. She left that night, and I don’t remember what her actual last words were to me – just that bit before. I still have the yearbook and those cards she left for me after she died, and I still think about that night.

I like animals of most all types, but one of my family’s cats had a particular affinity for me. I taught her to sit, to beg, and speak, like a dog, and she would perform none of these tricks for anyone else. She slept on me at night and would wander the house crying if I spent the night elsewhere. As she got older, she developed diseases as animals sometimes do, and none of us were surprised when she started having serious problems in her early teens. After midnight, she didn’t sleep on my bed one night, and we found her crying, laying in the hallway having suffered a stroke of some sort.

My whole family was out there before I was, and when I came in and tried to sit down on the floor with them to see what was going on, she looked up at me. It has never been more apparent to me that an animal is trying to communicate; I am never going to forget how she pled with her eyes for me to do something to take the pain away. This cat scrapped to get her front paws under her and started dragging her helpless lower body toward me, crying the whole time. I swept her into my lap and held her close until she was unconscious. We took her to the vet, and she passed away before there was much else we could have done.

These are irredeemably sad stories, but they’re true “last times.” And last times are always horribly, achingly sad, but I think we need them, and we need to remember them. When we’re sad, we can grapple with the aches of being human and having all our longings in a way that doesn’t make sense when we’re happy. We have a clearer sense of ourselves in compassion, and sympathy makes us stronger people together. In whatever sense it means, these “last times” make us the humans we are.

Kyle B. is some guy you've never heard of, but he's okay with that. He's a writer and journalist (also both a lover and fighter) that graduated from Kent State University a few years ago, with some slight gainful employment since. He loves to read but pretty much puts a new book back on the shelf if a couple of the first words on the jacket are "murder mystery" or "romance."  

*Post originally written October 7, 2010 to allow the regular author to catch up on her own reading and writing...or sleep.

Day 258: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Fated by S. G. Browne.  ISBN: 9780451231284.

I've always considered fate and destiny to be two sides of the same coin: fate is the bad stuff that's supposed to happen to us, destiny the good stuff.  I kind of like Browne's take on the concepts: people are born either on the Path of Fate or the Path of Destiny, and can't travel between the two.  The people on Fate's path have a predetermined life destination, if you will, that can be changed slightly by the choices they make; Fate spends a lot of time complaining that people tend to make bad decisions, and thus their fates go down the tubes pretty quickly.  The people on the Path of Destiny, however, are, well, destined for great things.  Those with fates, if they make the right choices, can sometimes get as high as, say, a one-term president, but those with destinies will become people who make world-changing decisions.

I feel like I was once on the Path of Destiny.  In school, it seemed like I was really going to take my smarts someplace.  People told me I had a lot of potential, but what I lacked was direction, focus, or motivation.  I never knew what I wanted to be, even though I could have been anything, and no one ever really pushed me towards anything.  The praise was great, but I think all it did was give me an inflated ego -- and that's not exactly a career choice.

In reading this book, I can see where I could have made much better decisions in my life.  Bad luck and outside influences have had a lot of negative effects on me, and I tend to blame those exclusively instead of myself.  It would have taken a lot more maturity than I think I have ever had until recently, and the ability to analyze my own behavior and decisions.  That ability, by the way, I believe is sorely lacking in our society.  If people were able to self-reflect on a regular basis, I think we'd have a lot less discord, because that action generates a consciousness of others in relation to our behavior.  You wouldn't have self-entitled jerks making unreasonable demands on retail clerks and fast food cashiers, for example.

But getting back to me, yeah, I've made some bad decisions in my life.  When I graduated high school, I wanted to get into game design, because I was really into video games at that point (talk about a bad influence), but I had no idea how to go about doing it.  So I went in for computer engineering in the hopes that I might be able to get a job and work my way through a technical video game school.  This was, by the way, back when there was ONE school that taught video games, and it was on the opposite coast from me, not to mention it was expensive and didn't offer scholarships.  I was therefore lucky to even be able to get into college, due to my working-class background, but I made a mess of it.

I decided that I'd gone into engineering for the wrong reasons and switched to computer science because most of the classes counted for credit between the two majors.  But comp sci wasn't my thing.  Not only was I not good at it, I more or less predicted the dot-com bust and got out of the field.  I knew that if I didn't, I'd be competing for jobs with people who were vastly more talented in the field than I was.  It's the best decision I ever made.  Unfortunately, then I went into English, because it was easy.  Yes, I missed writing, but I really wish I'd gone back to engineering.  I might have been able to make something of myself that way.

I dicked around in grad school after that, and made a couple more bad decisions that landed me with this unusable Master's degree.  What have I learned from it?  Don't trust omens, that's what got me in trouble.  I've always looked for the fantastic to guide me, because it's a handy excuse to not take responsibility for my own actions.  Well, no more.  I know what I want now, and I know how to get it.  Being able to get it, on the other hand, is another matter entirely, and that's one I can't really figure out at this point.  One day, I hope to get back on my right path and see if I can salvage whatever my fate may be.

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

Day 237: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Summerland by Michael Chabon.  ISBN: 9780786808779.

At one point in the story, our heroes have been captured by not-so-nice faeries.  Two of them break loose and search throughout the faeries' compound for a magic thingy that will heal their wounded friend.  As luck would have it, they eventually make their way into the fearies' treasure chamber.

Chabon points out that rather than being full of gold and jewels, the room is jam-packed with junk: broken odds and ends, discarded bits of stuff, and a whole lot of unmatched socks.  In other words, one human's trash is a faerie's treasure.  And while the fae seem to value most the things which they can steal undetected, I can still sort of sympathize with them.

All my life, I've always walked with my eyes pointed groundward and because of this choice in vantage points, I've brought many a piece of useless crap home.  I'm a compulsive junk collector, you might say.  Anything which I see on the sidewalk, in the grass, in the dirt, in the snow, or tarred to the road surface has a chance of winding up in my pockets, and from there, onto one of my shelves or one of the many heavy, plastic containers I have full of useless crap.  I've kept them around for years.  Did I mention I'm compulsive?

What I'm likely to pick up is hard to quantify.  Shiny things attract my attention.  The bulk of my collection is made up of rocks, but I've lately stopped really noticing those.  I tend to pick up things which are whole unto themselves, but otherwise broken.  Stuff with moving parts is great.  I've found toys, screws and bolts, jewelry (probably my favorite), wooden things, dice, rubber stampers, bottlecaps, cell phone batteries, pieces of plastic...  I could really go on and on.  I once found an entire car headlight, sans bulb.

Of course, it isn't all useless.  One of my most prized possessions is a metal hoop, a little over a foot in diameter, with a kink on one edge.  I think it used to be a TV antenna of some kind.  I hope to turn it into a microphone windscreen one day.  Not to mention, I find money constantly.  I once found over two dollars in random coins scattered over a ten-foot section of sidewalk.

I really think that what makes this 'hobby', if you will, so compelling is the sense of finding value where someone else sees none.  They discard it, I pick it up and treasure it.  And money is the best example, because you can actually use it for something.  One man's trash and all that.  Yes, dear, the junk is coming with me when we move in together.*  Some of it, anyway.

*That's what you think.

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday. 

**This post was originally written September 26, 2010 to allow the regular author a break and/or a chance to catch up on her own reading. 

Day 236: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Summerland by Michael Chabon.  ISBN: 9780786808779.

I guess I should talk about baseball.

Being a nerd and all, I'm not all up on my sports.  I always got C's in gym due to being out of shape and thoroughly unconcerned with the whole winning and losing bit.  I'm not terribly coordinated, and I sure don't give a damn about team spirit.  I'm one of those people who watches the Super Bowl for the commercials (because, damn, they funny).

But yeah, baseball.  It's never appealed to me, what with the running and the sliding in the dirt and the having to hit/catch a hard little ball with a hard little stick of wood/thin leather glove.  It's kind of like golf, only more sadistic.  I'd much rather play kickball, which at least has you aiming for a much larger target.

Which is funny, because one of the few sports I like playing is tennis (the other one is soccer).  At least the rackets have much larger surface area than a baseball bat, and you don't have to worry about having more than one other person on your team, if that.  I was very surprised when I first took tennis in gym class, how much I enjoyed it, and I can't really say for certain what about the game appeals to me.  I do know that I took it again during the requisite second year of gym class (we got to pick about four different activities per semester).

Baseball, football, hockey, basketball: it probably is the team aspect which turns me away.  I never liked working in groups as a student, so why should playing on a team be any different?  And yet, reading this book, a game of baseball seemed so nice.  Who knows, if I hadn't been so awkward and uncoordinated, maybe I could have come to appreciate a leisurely game of baseball between friends.

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday.