Why lawyers are like avocados

Umberto Eco is probably best known for his novels like The Name of the Rose and the like, big sprawling novels that I see at book sales and libraries all the time and always kind of ignore, assuming they’re not my style.  In contrast, his tidy little collection of essays brilliantly (for people like me) titled How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays has been on my short list for years, and I have scoured countless bookshelves in search of it, to no avail.

Until Monday, when I discovered it sitting innocently in the public library, as if it had been there all along rather than concealed somewhere in the bowels of the earth.

I expected some sort of metaphorical finagling in the titular essay to bring its superficial ridiculosity down to a more respectable level.  To my utter delight, there was none.  “How to Travel with a Salmon” is all of two pages long, and the salmon– a real, nonmetaphorical salmon– is purchased in the second paragraph.  And those two pages?  Hysterically funny.  In the penultimate sentence appears this sentence: “I asked for a lawyer, and they brought me an avocado.”  It’s fabulous.

Most of the other essays are similar: brief, anecdotal, hilarious.  There were only a few longer than three pages and a few dull enough for me to skim.  The rest are gems.

The common aim of most of them is to satirize the modern world, or at least the modern world of the late ’80s and early ’90s– hence titles like “How Not to Use the Fax Machine,” which indicates that the author had no inkling of how electronic mail would exacerbate the problems he addresses, like spam.  The mere notion of fax spam is actually really amusing to me, considering that I only use fax for college applications and similar official things.

Also, conceptually I still find fax machines really bizarre, but we can go into that at another date.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that some of the selections have the tone of an old guy expressing suspicion over the effects of modern technology on society.  These are suspicions I sympathize with but, as you might imagine, do not fully agree with.  The benefits of technology like email, in my opinion, outweigh the unfortunate side effects.

Eco also pokes fun at a number of things we all can get behind, including: pompous art criticism, the Italian version of the DMV, airplane food (this one is amazing), sports fans oblivious to your uninterest, people who make jokes about your name that you’ve heard a million times before (”the first idea that comes into a person’s mind will be the most obvious one…”), and instruction manuals for gadgetry or appliances, which he claims “expound at length things so self-evident that you are tempted to skip them, thus missing the one truly essential bit of information:”

In order to install the PZ40 it is necessary to unwrap the packaging and remove the appliance from the box.  The PZ40 can be extracted from its container only after the latter is opened.  The container is opened by lifting, in opposite directions, the two flaps of the upper side of the box (see diagram below).  [...] In the event that the lid does not open at the first attempt, the consumer is advised to try a second time.  Once the lid is opened, it is advisable to tear off the red strip before removing the inner, aluminum lid; otherwise the container will explode.  WARNING: after the PZ40 has been removed, the container can be discarded.

It goes on at some length, but I was laughing too hard to type it out.  Anyway, read this book.

Aside: I was either going to review this or Freakonomics, which is also excellent in the way popular economics books are.  But everyone’s already heard of Freakonomics and probably already knows whether or not they should read it, whereas How to Travel with a Salmon is more obscure.

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The thing about waking up at 3 AM

The thing about waking up at 3 AM is that your day suddenly becomes exceedingly long, at least if you have any intention of staying awake until a respectable hour.  Even if you don’t actually get out of bed until 5 AM.

Also, you’re used to getting up so early only in order to go on a trip or, more often, to finish homework you hadn’t gotten around to doing the previous day.  So you feel a compelling, unshakable urge to be productive.  Except it’s summer.  There is nothing to produce.

You open up your laptop and check your email, but it feels all wrong.  You didn’t get up at 5 to check your email!  You could’ve just done that last night.  Except, oh wait, yesterday you were drowsy and despite waking up at noon, drinking coffee, creating and consuming muffins (joy!), you couldn’t keep your eyes open past 8 PM.

Which is why you now know that it starts getting light outside, and the birds start singing, at about 4 AM these days.  Useful information, that is.  Maybe you’ll blog about it later.

As you read through your email, you are additionally irked to learn that it was very recently 04:05:06 on 07/08/09, and you were (miracle of miracles) awake at that time, yet too sadly unenlightened to grasp the significance and celebrate appropriately.

You get the newspaper and take a moment to stand in the middle of the road in your pajamas and pretend you’re the only person on Earth.

When you go to the kitchen to boil water for tea, you observe the stack of dirty dishes in the sink and decide you’d rather not cook today.  Besides, the stove is broken.

Blueberries, peaches, cherries

Today is what I would call a “feel-good day.”  It began with blueberries.

Later, at about 12:30, I decided to eat lunch and realized there wasn’t any.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned that I’ve started cooking recently.  But I have.  Mostly basic stuff, but at least it’s teaching me how it feels to butcher a vegetable in cold blood and weep profusely for it.  Sigh, onions.

Anyway, usually my mom and I discuss what I’ll be cooking the next day, if anything, but we hadn’t discussed anything for lunch today (probably because we tacitly assumed I wouldn’t get up early enough to require a meal between breakfast and dinner).  So I improvised with carrots, zucchini, and some weird onion-based concoction that I found in the fridge, all tossed in a pan with some oil.  I added (already cooked) rice and dumped it in a bowl.

I did not have high expectations.  But it actually tasted pretty good, mostly because of the weird onion-based concoction that I didn’t even make but was quite tasty.  Honestly, I’m just proud I didn’t under- or overcook the carrots.

That was nice, self-esteem-wise, but the better part, taste-wise, was dessert.

Dessert was yogurt (homemade, but not by us) with, um, jam– for lack of a better term– made (by us) from fresh blueberries, and homemade (again by us) granola.  Don’t let the parenthetical asides distract you from the deliciousness being described.  I don’t think I’m describing it sufficiently.  I don’t think it’s possible.  So delicious.

And then an unbelievably ripe and juicy peach.

And then a half-hour walk in the blazing beautiful sunshine, then not missing the bus, then making music with Maddie, then sitting on Maddie’s front porch eating popsicles and shooting the breeze.  Over an hour spent discussing auditioning for college and how to get an A in Lang and ships, and with not a care in the world– at least none that needed to be cared about for an afternoon.

We have reached the following conclusion: summer is nice.  We like summer.

And then coming home and eating a dinner that I did not cook, because my mom happened to be present.  And then cherries.

Yay, trees

Just a quick note to those of you who, for one reason or another, have failed to notice my shiny new blog header.  It does not feature this critter because my drawing skills suck a whole lot more than my photography skills.  Instead, it features lots of nice green leaves (which probably look a little familiar to you readers) and a quote by Marcus Aurelius.

Somehow I’m always in a more philosophical mood when I make my blog headers than when I actually write in my blog, so I always sense some sort of awkward tonal disconnect there.

But I’m always rather fond of my headers anyway.  Which is why I’ve created a page archiving them, which can be found in my sidebar– or, for you all coming via RSS or Facebook or Twitter (sigh, technology), here.

Wow, I thought uploading the image would stop me from messing with it obsessively.  Apparently not.

EDIT (10:16 PM): Yeah actually, I’m still reworking it.  Pretend it’s not there.

EDIT (10:32 PM): Oh, forget it.  My OCD muscles are hurting.

Fiction

I have a confession to make.  Reading fiction is getting harder for me.

Blame it on the internet or on sheer youthfulness, but I lack the patience to plumb the depths of meaning of a novel, a potentially and discouragingly endless task.  As I read, all I can see are the words, sentences, paragraphs– the way language is used in a very localized sense.  If the writing is not astonishingly beautiful or breath-takingly funny, I lose interest.

Gary Shteyngart achieves both beautiful and humorous language use in Absurdistan, but somehow, it’s not quite enough.

What he does achieve sufficiently well, in my admittedly rather uninformed opinion, is political commentary.  Very disturbing political commentary, which is equivalent to very good political commentary, about a region of the world that you can probably infer from the title.  This is interspersed with a lot of very graphically described sex, which is either some sort of social commentary or porn.  Hard to tell, sometimes.

Although what nearly made me gag was not the sex but the clichés, specifically the chapter entitled “Birds of Prey” that featured that well-worn tool of the novelist’s toolbox: the character who, in a big long speech interspersed with occasional “I don’t understand”s from the protagonist, explains all the stuff that’s seemed not quite right to you throughout the entire book.

I really should get over my aversion to clichés, because they’re ubiquitous– and ubiquitous for a reason.  They work.  Or, depending on the sort of clichés you’re talking about: they’re true.

My only other major gripe with Absurdistan is not with the book itself, but with the dust jacket summary, which sucks majorly.  Most of these summaries overview maybe the first quarter or first third of the book, and then encapsulate the rest with sweeping generalities and praise.  Absurdistan’s seemed to follow this formula pretty religiously.

But it was deceptive.  Oh so deceptive.  The stupid summary should’ve come with spoiler tags, because it actually describes events that take place during the first three-quarters of the book, which is, you know, most of it.  Yet it describes them as though they took place during the first quarter of the book, as if they were mere prologue to the real meat of the novel, which resulted in the weird sensation of reading and expecting all the stuff that was described on the dust jacket, stuff that stubbornly refused to happen.  It was weird.  And slightly unpleasant.

At any rate, this is not really a legit review of Absurdistan, because it’s actually a pretty good book despite my lowering tolerance level for fiction.  (And of course the quality of the dust jacket summary has absolutely nothing to do with the book itself…)  For a taste of the sort of black humor you’ll get, I shall close with an excerpt from the narrator’s grant proposal to build “The Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies, aka the Museum of Sevo-Jewish Friendship.”

The “Think It Can’t Happen Again?” Annex
Yeah, you think so?  Well, think again, friend.  This daring conceptual space will feature dozens of French Arab youths throwing rocks at passing museumgoers, threatening, “Six million more,” while passive French intellectuals stand by in the shadows, smoking and drinking, smoking and drinking.  For safety reasons, the “rocks” will be made of 100 percent paper, and the French Arab youths will be caged.

Yeah.  Now run off and enjoy your summer day.

(By the way, if you’re wondering about currentness– which you probably should be– this book was published in 2006, and the action takes place during a couple months of 2001.  It ends, predictably, on September 10.)

Not about barbells or barnacles

Wow.  So yesterday I got home at about 9 and sat down to write a blog post that Maddie and I had discussed, involving her mishearing “Barnes and Nobles” as “barbells” or perhaps “barnacles.”  But then I got distracted by the stack of the books I had bought recently.

First of all, I’m kind of a nerd.  You could infer that from The Colossal Book of Mathematics by Martin Gardner (one word: SQUEE!), but if you can read the bottom title, that’s actually the nerdier book by a long shot.  That’s the book that makes you spontaneously decide to learn new programming languages.

Second of all, since about half of those are from the Friends of the Library Book Sale and the rest were bought with gift cards, I spent a lot less on them than you might expect.  Oops, I lie; I paid full price for Freakonomics (in the Amherst bookstore too).  But seriously… so many Barnes and Nobles gift cards!  I got $60 of books today (er, yesterday) and just started handing gift card after gift card over to the cashier.  It was rather amusing for both of us.

Third of all, the color scheme is striking.

But not as striking in photos as in real life.  I tried to quickly correct that in iPhoto by fiddling with the temperature/tint sliders before writing the blog post that I was TOTALLY just about to write, in just a second… but then I discovered that iPhoto will actually do the heavy lifting for you, if you’ll only tell it what’s a neutral color in the photo.  I can’t believe it took me so long to figure this out, because it is actually magic.  Observe the improvement:

Finally, Smetana Hall in my photos can achieve a little more of the grandeur it displays in reality.  (As can Ryan.  Teehee.)

THEN I was further distracted by the adorable graffiti I saw today (gah! yesterday!), while walking from breakfast at CTB to the library foundation, where yes, I do still volunteer.  I am a huge fan of cute graffiti (similarly smart or insightful graffiti), because it is cuteness where you are not expecting cuteness, and that is a wonderful thing.

I felt inspired to replicate it.  The original is better though, if only for the setting.

I thought he might be a nice character to put into a blog header– because I seriously need a new blog header, ja?– so I spent far more time than necessary making potential blog headers.  And looking at old potential blog headers that I made in similar fits of creativity and that never saw the light of day.

And then it was midnight.

Which is far too late to be blogging, except it’s really not, but I didn’t feel like blogging anymore.  But I did feel like staying up till 3 AM doing nothing in particular.  I definitely get what Jiyoung was saying when she told me about staying up all night just because you’re not tired.  At all.  I went to bed more out of a sense of obligation than any physical desire to sleep.

Then I slept till noon.

SO.  This is a long and elaborate way of telling Maddie, “Sorry for not spicing up your late-night cello-practicing break with a blog post about our 2.5 hour rehearsal that was mostly spent eating blueberries, reading incomprehensible Chinese books, and sightreading songs by Kermit the Frog.  I’ll make it up to you someday.”

Photographic intercession

Another one of those busy summer days

Despite my continuing failure to clean my room (I think the laundry pile is becoming sentient), I would have to call today OCD Day solely for the amount of time I dedicated to cleaning up my contacts list.  An amount of time that I do not care to disclose.

The main problem was that somehow, in all the syncing with my iPhone and Gmail and such, a whole bunch of duplicate contact cards were created.  Plus a bunch of people had a card for their phone number and a separate card for their email, which was okay until this morning, when I realized I could not and would not stand for such sloppiness.

What I didn’t do was delete all the contacts that are probably obsolete or that I am generally unlikely to use in the future.  Even though some of these people I met at camp like six years ago, or I emailed a total of one time for a Tattler interview four years ago, or whatever.  I guess having a bunch of contacts makes me feel popular.  Which is silly.  Everyone knows the REAL test for popularity is how many Facebook friends you have.  I mean, honestly.

I was intelligent (for once) and transferred all the contacts from my old phone to my computer before the SIM card was wiped in the painfully delayed iPhone activation process.  So all those phone numbers were preserved… with the exception of Eva’s.  I have no idea how this happened.  I promise it was not intentional.  Eva, if you’re reading this and care to send me your phone number(s), I would welcome their return to my address book.

The other slightly OCD thing I did was update my bloated quotes page (linked in the sidebar) with exciting new quotes, and remove some of the HTML residue that was left from a lot of copy/pasting.  I should probably split that page into a few so you don’t have to scroll like a madman to find anything.  That’ll be my exciting project for another day.

Graduation (the ceremony)

Actually, I can write about graduation.

Graduation (the ceremony) is really for everyone except the graduates.  Graduation was an incredibly significant night for me as a family member in 2006, and as a friend in 2007 and 2008.  But as a graduate myself in 2009, it was essentially a meaningless formality for something that I’d known in my heart since June 12: that high school was over, and many things would simply never be the same.

That’s why we needed a rehearsal for graduation: to make sure we all processed properly, with smiles on our faces and an arm’s length between us and our predecessors, and to make sure we knew what to wear and what not to wear (and what not to not wear), and to make sure we knew when exactly we could switch our tassels from the left side of our caps to the right.  Few events of any actual significance need to be rehearsed in that particular way, because few such events have anything to do with form and all such events have everything to do with spirit.

Honestly, I expected that graduation would be crowded and hot and dull, but also intensely or even painfully emotional for me.  Instead, it was crowded and hot and dull and hardly emotional at all.  It was errant beach balls and heartfelt but corny speeches and, perhaps above all, a popularity contest.  It really was just pomp and circumstance.

Graduation was valuable not for any intrinsic reason but for what it forced me to realize about the day that truly mattered, which was June 12, which was the last day of high school, which was when I had to seriously think about what it meant for high school to be ending and for many things to be simply (or not so simply) never the same.

The point of high school was not the moment when I walked across the stage to receive my diploma, or even the whole two hours that made up graduation.  That’s like saying the point of your trip around the world is the moment when you pull into your driveway at the end of it.  That moment is critical, because the journey would not be complete without it.  But to focus your attention entirely on that moment would be to miss the real point.

And the real point, of course, always was and always will be the journey itself.

You know.