The Scatterbrained Booky

I think I fulfilled my non fiction quota for the next five years by reading this book.  Coates won the National Book Award for this, deservedly so.  This is the most powerful writing I've read in a long time.  Written in the spirit of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (which I haven't read), this is a powerful treatise on being black in America, written by one of the foremost writers on the topic today.  The book takes the form of a letter to Coates' teenage son, and it is deeply personal and universal, the writing dense and rich and so intimate, that it automatically posits the reader as an outsider, regardless of your racial identification.  It is a brilliant structural device to tackle these issues.  Coates reflects on his youth growing up in Baltimore, his awakening at Howard University, and how the American state, upheld by "those who think themselves white," brutalizes and systematically destroys black bodies, regardless of class.  Coates realization that not even class can protect black bodies was a sucker punch.  He talks about his classmate, Prince getting shot in a case of mistaken identity.  He talks about how these bodies represent so many hours of investment and love and hope - so many hours spent driving back and forth to soccer practice, supervising sleepovers.  That line just wrecked me.  You'd think this book is hopeless, and yet, somehow, the very act of writing means that it's not.  It's a warning, a parenting memoir, a treatise on race, all rolled up into one.  I can't recommend this enough. 

 went on a bit of a tear for a bit, and my brain was all the better for it.  I can't believe I slept on Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay.  This collection of essays from a self-proclaimed "bad feminist" is everything.  You can see her Ted Talk below.  Gay is a relatable, self-critical, pop-culture-savvy, conflicted feminist, which means that we are kindred spirits.  She is smart, and funny, and while I don't agree with everything she says, I like that she's thinking about these things.  Her essay on being a competitive Scrabble player is quite possibly my favorite in the whole collection.  I love her, I love her Twitter presence, and I can't wait to read her forthcoming book about being fat.

From there, I flipped to Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me (I told you I was on a tear). Solnit is known for coining the term "mansplaining" which, let's be real gyals, we've ALL experienced.  I've had to call the Dotytron on it, when he does that.  There were times when we'd be talking about smoking (food), and he'd jump in and start talking about the process like he was the one who smoked the meat in our house and I'd have to jump in and shut it down.  Anyway, this series of essays was rage-inducing.  The essay on sexual assault, in particular.  When she talks about how much money the government is willing to expend to combat terrorism but how we do nothing to fix sexual assault but put the burden on women...I was so mad!  Reading Bad Feminist and Men Explain Things to Me back to back lead to many arguments in the Dotytron-Lagerfeld household.  I had my hackles locked in the UP position.

My book club picked Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts as a read, two reads ago.  This is a semi-autobiographical loose collection about Nelson's relationship with trans artist Harry Dodge.  The book opens with him f**king her from behind, bent over something concrete, if I recall.  I'm not familiar with Nelson's work but I know she's popular amongst the intelligentsia.  She's a poet?  Anyway, to me, the book read kind of smugly progressive.  Like, "look how cool I am in how this is so not an issue."  Which, look, I totally get!  I'm on board!  But I she just seems kind of humble-braggy about it?  I don't know how else to put it.  I kind of wanted to know more about Dodge, and his perspective.  There's one point when Dodge makes a statement that he's not "on his way anywhere" in reaction to the term "transitioning."  I only really felt like I was getting at the "real" Nelson when she was talking about being pregnant and giving birth to her child with Dodge - all the affectations and airs seemed to fall away as she gloried in this embodiment, which is at odds, whether conscious or not, with the tone of the rest of the book.  I'm glad I read it, because this is a buzzy, in-the-moment book, but I didn't love it.

So this gets me slightly back on track, even though I have like, thirty more books to review.  

This was your International Women's Day-themed book review compendium.

Fin.

Babylon Registration

I registered the Big Yam for junior kindergarten yesterday.  The night before, I was a bit of a sleepless wreck because of it.  Well technically, it was 1 part "my baby is growing up!"/"I hope the school system doesn't strip him of his innocence and openness", 1 part the Wonder Twins only wanting to sleep if they had a steady intake of boob nectar, and 1 part reading this Guardian article about James Lovelock and how he's this big climate change doomsday guy who basically says that we've fallen off the precipice and that the effects of global warming are irreversible, any attempts we make to curb greenhouse gas emissions are laughable, and that in 20 years we're facing a future of famine, mass human migration, and other Max Max-type nightmare apocalyptic scenarios.  This of course spiralled into, "Why am I bringing children into this horrific future?" and on and on and on.

Anyway, I was fully expecting to be an emotional wreck, picturing this as a bit of a dress rehearsal for his ACTUAL first day of kindergarten when I will have to drop him off by myself (as the Dotytron will be facilitating OTHER people's kids' first days of school) and will probably promptly come home and bawl myself silly.  I somehow turned a corner without knowing it and now that I'm faced with the open, guileless, exuberant person my Yam turned out to be, I want to protect him from all that school represents.  It's the thin edge of the wedge here, people.  Bullying!  Other people's poor parenting decisions!  Hegemony!  Conformity!  Well meaning but ill-informed liberalism!  Gross white kids in fedoras!  It's all there and then some.  I can't shield him from all this ugliness indefinitely, but I would like more time.  It's so personality dependent, too.  The Big Yam is a gentle, sweet kid who doesn't have the kind of toughened, entitled, bragadociousnes with which I swaggered into kindergarten.  I've been hanging around with the Wonder Twins at drop-in centres trying to suss out prospective nannies and the reports from staff, other parents, and caregivers who frequent the centres are all unanimous - the Big Yam has a reputation as being a considerate, good-natured, kind soul.  I mean, the kid spent an hour yesterday practising his hip hop dance routine, of his own volition.

I digress.  I also put the cart before the horse.  Yesterday's registration turned out to be rather unemotional and instead, boringly administrative.  So much paperwork!  Emergency contacts and then a 6 page sheet on your kid - what they can do, their fears, their interests, their skill level.  SO MUCH HANDWRITING.  My hand cramped up after writing my address.  Seriously school board, can't this stuff be done online?!  Upload that shiz yo!  I didn't even know how to answer the questions - my sense is that they're just trying to prescreen for those kids who have always been at home with a parent or doting grandparents and haven't been socialised.  For his interests, I put down: transportation, dance, music, reading, philosophy.  LOL!

Last night was Academic Book Club, which is slowly being seeded with non-professors, which is nice.  We read A.M. Homes' May We Be Forgiven.  It's about this kind of layabout, directionless, blank slate man, Harold Silver, whose brother has clear violent issues and basically destroys his family, leaving Harold to pick up the pieces.  It sounds like very, very heavy stuff, and yet, the book is blackly comedic (I would say more black than comedy).  I had a lot of issues with this book.  Unlike similar family-implosion books (Jonathan Tropper's This is Where I Leave You for example), I had a hard time navigating the tone of this one.  According to my book club member, Homes is deeply critical of the ridiculousness of bourgeois, middle-class American life and this is meant to be a big EFF-YOU to that.  I got that to a certain extent, but I found the satire was lacking.  Right when things would border on being humorous (in a Jonathan Tropper/David Sedaris way), Homes would bring in an element of grotesqueness or grim, discomfiting reality (bully brother as a child circumcising a cousin in the basement during a family gathering), or something so beyond the realm of reality that it made the novel no longer funny but just kind of depressing and unbelievable.  I kept getting jolted out of my wavering investment in the characters and events.  The ending is also a little tacked-on and maudlin as well.  I was also uncomfortable with how a non-Jewish writer wrote a Jewish main character - first of all, I never got that Harold Silver was Jewish.  As my (Jewish) book club friend said, "Bashing your wife's head in with a lamp so isn't a Jew way to kill someone.  First of all, if he was Jewish, she probably would have been able to fight him off."  LOL!  I was also uncomfortable with a lot of the Asian stereotypes and supporting characters, whose race was used for cheap jokes.

I wasn't the biggest fan, but Book Club was of course, hilarious.  One of the academics was talking about how she'd read in The New York Times about "this app that allows gay people to look up other people who are nearby who want to have sex" and I'm like, "Yeah, Grindr, what's the deal?" and she's like, "How do you know about it?" and I'm like, "BECAUSE I LIVE IN THE WORLD, DUH."  I will never understand how these women can read everything like The New Yorker, The Guardian, Slate, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and still KNOW NOTHING!  How can you be so "informed" but be so clueless at the same time?!?  It's the biggest paradox to me.

Other books I've read lately.

Travelling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott, who writes fiction, memoirs, and is a contributor to Slate.  This was another Academic Book Club pick.  I was intrigued.  Lamott became Christian later in life and is a leftist Christian.  I am so deeply secular that I find it hard to empathise or relate to people who have religion or faith in their lives.  You might as well be telling me that you believe in aliens.  In this memoir, which is really well written (she can turn a pretty phrase and conjure evocative, imaginative metaphors), she talks about how she came to Christianity and how her faith has helped her.  To me, the idea of praying and knowing that God exists is so far removed, I can't even approximate what that must be like.  Anyway, I found the book revealing because Lamott is kind of a gong show.  Recovering alcoholic, eating disorders, unnaturally obsessed with her son.  She writes about the mother-son relationship charmingly and describes her love for him in a way that completely resonated with me, but at the same time, there was definitely an undercurrent that she was/is too reliant on her kid.  Like, she NEEDS her son to prop her up in some way (she's a single mother).  Her son ends up getting some woman pregnant at like, the age of 19, after going to "art college" and living and studying on his mom's dime (yes, I'm feeling judgemental about that).  Also, Anne Lamott looks like this:  

That is to say: kind of cray.  Even though she writes about her hair in this book that I read, I can't get over the thin white-lady dreads.  She also comes across as mad drama.  Too emotional.  The kind of friend who has too many peaks and keening lows and NEEDS YOU all the time to talk them off the ledge.  Still, it was worthwhile reading.

Y'all know how much I loved Eleanor and Park, so based on my sis' frantic FB status updates on her book, Fangirl, I read that and followed that up with Attachments (her first novel).  Fangirl is a YA book about one half of a twin sister set who goes off to university and experiences the inevitable growing pains of that first year away from home.  The girl, Cather (sister named Wren - Cather-Wren, get it?  I will say that one of my bones of contention with Rainbow Rowell is her character naming!  It's so teenaged girl Writer's Craft!  I should know!  Every female character in my OAC Writer's Craft course had a name like Mächen, or Zelda), writes fan fiction and is famous in the fan fiction world.  When she goes to college, her sister decides to forge her own, independent path, leaving Cather, who has clear anxiety and attachment issues stemming from their mother's abandonment and their father's mental issues, to figure out how to become an autonomous being.  The writing is SO GOOD.  It was deeply addictive reading and the romance in it (OF COURSE THERE'S A ROMANCE!) unfolds in a YA-approved way.  I loved this book.  Some people have had quibbles with all the examples of Cather's fan-fic that are interspersed amongst the chapters, and I can see that, but I might have liked this more than Eleanor and Park, if that was even possible.  Eleanor and Park goes to this really dark place that I didn't love, but the boy-girl stuff in it is better than in Fangirl.

Attachments is written from a male point of view and is skewed older than YA.  The characters are in their mid-to-late 20s and it's about a guy who is some kind of arrested development genius who is living at home with his somewhat smothering, over protective mother, working nights where he screens people's flagged inappropriate emails at a major newspaper (this book takes place in the late 90s).  By reading the email exchanges between two female staffers, he starts to fall for one.  This was okay.  A decent, quick read but I didn't love it.  Let's just say I can see how Rowell got a book deal, but this one definitely felt like a person's first novel to me.

Relish is a graphic memoir that chronicles the author Lucy's long standing love affair with food.  Picking particular dishes and memorable food moments throughout her life, she illustrates how her gourmand parents instilled in her a love of fine wine and cuisine.  The book has charmingly illustrated recipes and I quite like the clean-lined drawing style.  However, I will say that it felt kind of slight.  She was raised by a pioneering caterer mother in Rhinebeck, New York, before Rhinebeck became Rhinebeck and I would have liked to see more of that.  Otherwise, it's a pretty flimsy memoir as far as memoirs go, and the food writing isn't as tantalizing as top-notch food writing can be.  I didn't salivate once.  

I finished the Divergent series and as I suspected before it came out, Veronica Roth didn't end on a high note.  Like many other YA trilogies there were too many loose ends to wrap up and it wasn't properly plotted.  The ending of the series is deeply unsatisfying and meandering.  The message is all garbled and while there is a big, shocking death of a principal character, I wasn't super invested in any of them any way.  It felt like a chore to read.  

And that pretty much brings me up to date on the reading tip.  Not too shabby for a mum of 3, if I do say so myself.  

Last weekend we spent with my sis and outlaw bro.  It was a very low-key weekend.  Lots of eating, maxing, relaxing, some House of Cards watching, and some shopping at Target.  We left on Valentine's day, but I still made the Big Yam make Valentine's for his friends.  We did a heart-shaped potato stamp on cardstock, signed his name on the back, and made these chocolate sugar cookie cut-outs and gave them out in little cello bags tied with red yarn bows.  

Valentine's breakfast

Our Valentine's dinner was boss.  A friend of mine from the jungle days is the chef de cuisine at Aft Kitchen, a tiny barbecue restaurant in Riverside.  He hooked us up with 2lbs of brisket, their queso mac'n'cheese, baked beans, and collards.  The brisket was SO GOOD.  Melting, fatty, with a delicious crusty barque.  It was amazing.  So spoiled.

Made a batch of cheescake brownies recently.  Ate practically the whole pan.  My go-to recipe is this one from an old issue of Gourmet magazine (RIP Gourmet magazine, I miss you so).  

I finally tried the famous Marcella Hazan tomato sauce that's been floating around the internet.  Made a triple batch and dialed back the butter a bit.  I froze it but used some for a skillet lasagne dish - it's really good!  Nice and rich with the acidity of the tomatoes mellowed by the butter and simmered onion.  I thinned mine with a bit of water.

Made a version of the Barefoot Contessa's (one of the most ridiculous cooking persona names, ever!) pot roast with roasted tatties and brussels sprouts.  The pot roast was bomb.  My new trick is to freeze the extra pot roast/beef braising liquid to use to add richness to beef broth-based soups, or in pastas like the one below.

Mushroom pappardelle with garlic bread.  So easy!  Sautéed like, almost 2 lbs of thickly sliced onions in butter/oil.  Then added diced onion, garlic, and about 500mL of pot roast liquid and a sprig of rosemary.  Reduced it and then tossed with just-cooked pappardelle with some pasta cooking water to loosen.  Finished with grated parm.  I ate bowlfuls and bowlfuls of this stuff.

Cheddar broccoli soup and Ace bakery roasted garlic bread, spread with my garlic butter and broiled on both sides, then spread with basil-scape pesto and topped with white beans that I simmered then mashed with some rosemary and lemon zest.  Topped with a drizzle of good olive oil.  So good!

Fin.

Garfing

As I mentioned Tuesday, the Big Yam made himself puke when I made him try to eat a grape tomato.  For the rest of the day, he kept asking me and the Dotytron, "Remember when I garfed?" and we'd be like, "It's not called garfing, it's called BARFing" and then he'd give us this knowing look and grin and say, "I gaaarrrfffeed."  LOL!

Then, when I was driving us home from the documentary on Sunday evening, close to midnight, and I wasn't aggressive enough and got honked at switching lanes, he somehow roused himself from his slumber enough to give me a hard time and chirp me about my driving AFTER the Dotytron had already yelled at me: "Mama, why the other car honk? The other car honk because the car move honk slow. That's why. Mama driving the car honk."

He's totally hilarious right now - super into talking about tooting and bums and who tooted and cracking up when he toots.  I came home yesterday to the sight of the Big Yam playing Simon Says and freeze tag with all the kids from the neighbourhood and it was one of the cutest things ever - he was grinning from ear to ear and even got to be Simon for a bit, even though he had just learned the game.  Adorable!  Love my street so hard.

In twerps-gestating related news, one of my feet has turned into a ham hock from edema (basically, 3rd trimester water retention).  Edema is common in the 3rd trimester but probably isn't being helped along by me eating a million hot dogs in a sitting.  Oops.  The last ultrasound the twerps scored 8/8 on their Biophysical Profile (BPP) which according to my OB is pretty stellar because it's hard to get a perfect score at their gestational age because they only just started breathing.  So I'm joking that they're already Rhodes scholars.  SOMEBODY HAS TO HAVE THE FUNDS TO KEEP ME IN THE STYLE TO WHICH I'VE BECOME ACCUSTOMED WHEN I'M IN MY DOTAGE!

So...we bought a car.  YIKES!  A 2010 Honda Odyssey with the entertainment package.  It was definitely the best ride out of all the minivans we drove.  We ended up abandoning the caravan when we test drove it and realized that it's basically like driving a truck/SUV.  Not a smooth ride at all!  Plus, the midrange models have NO frills.  For the same price, we could get a slightly used midrange Sienna or Odyssey that has MAD frills - power everything, tinted windows, the stupid entertainment package, built in sunscreens, separate climate controls for each "zone" of the minivan.  It was a pretty hilarious experience buying it.  We went down there with a set price in mind and I'm a little mad that we ended up getting bumped up $500 over what I had set as my limit.  I want another kick at the can because I feel like the Dotytron and I are on a roll with our negotiating skills and with one more chance to refine the personas, we could get a slightly better deal.

The salesperson was all like, "We'll take your offer, but are you going to take the extended warranty? I have to have this to show to head office, so it doesn't look like we took such a loss on the vehicle." And I'm like, "Our price and the extended warranty are TWO SEPARATE THINGS. Go get our offer confirmed and then we'll decide if we want the warranty."  Then he was hounding us to commit to whether or not we wanted financing, and I wasn't going to give that away (they love it when you take financing).  Then he came back with our price but was like, "Guys, I need to know, can you do maybe $300 more?  Then we can close it up and all go home - my manager just wants an extra couple of hundred bucks."  The Dotytron stared at him for almost a full minute, and then said, simply: "No."  LOL!!! It was the best!  We're having our mechanic take a look at it today and I think based on what he comes back with, then I might try to knock down the price a few extra hundred and we're going to take the extra extended bumper-to-bumper warranty.  I called our auto electric people, who are SO NICE.  It's a family shop and they're so cute.  They're the ones who handled all the alternator/battery issues the Captain was having.  Anyway, I explained the situation and was asking her advice on whether we should take the warranty and she said it was a good idea, at the price they were offering.  Then she wanted to know why we were getting a minivan and told me to bring the babies by when they're born because she wanted to see them.  HOW CUTE IS THAT!?  This isn't even our mechanic, this is our AUTO ELECTRIC person.  So adorable!  I love them.

Anyway, I'm still willing to walk away if they won't come down a few hundred, but it's hard once you think you're done the process.  Like, do we really want to spend another night in a car dealership doing the fake back and forth where the salesperson takes your offer to the "manager" for approval and they sit there watching Youtube videos for like, 10 minutes?  Is it really worth the extra $500?  We'll see.  It's just nice to be done.  The Dotytron has already gotten to the point where he's like, "The real question is: what should we name it?  Jean Claude Van Damme?  Van Wilding?  Van Helsing?"  It's good to know someone has their priorities straight.

My Academic Book Club met last week and it turned into a gripe session about the gendered way (all the women in book club are in heterosexual relationships) that domestic/household/administrative work gets divided in members' respective households and how to avoid that.  We're going to be reading that Lean In book next so it was topical - a lot of women felt that their husband's careers were moving forward and that in exchange, the male partners got a pass from doing the domestic work/child rearing stuff.  It always amazes me when I go to Book Club and see that some of these dudes have like, no clue on how to get THEIR OWN CHILDREN down to bed.  I'm like, dude, that's YOUR kid!  What the heck?!?  Just hearing about how some of the women felt they were taking on too much slack or getting into unproductive arguments about domestic division that resulted in them quietly going to clean the kitchen anyway made my blood boil.

I get that in every relationship, the stresses of the day and the distribution of labour (seen on a day-to-day basis) are going to result in arguments.  If the argument is unproductive though, that's balls.  Sometimes, I pick a fight with the Dotytron because all I want to hear is some acknowledgement that yes, I do a lot of invisible labour that makes our lives run smoothly - that menu planning is work.  To his credit, the Dotytron gets it.  So yeah, it might not be a 50-50 split, but I don't necessarily think I want it to be?  I'm too much of a control freak for that and a micro-manager.  In our household, I'm happy to do all the scurrying legwork/research part of the not-fun stuff (car insurance, life insurance, car research, mortgage rates) in exchange for the ability to say to the Dotytron, "clean the bathroom," "clean the litterbox."  I think it's unrealistic to expect both parties in a domestic relationship to care to the same extent about the same things (e.g. people have different definitions of what constitutes "clean" or some people just don't notice crap on the kitchen floor, etc.)  So I'm fine being the noticer and taking on the stuff that super-bugs me (the kitchen floor) as long as the work is distributed equally if you take a long-range view of things.  That being said, I had the good fortune to find a partner who shoulders 50% (if not more) of the parenting/domestic duties with grace and good humour and competence.

Anyway, that's just my little diatribe on the nature of productive arguments and gender domestic labour distribution.

Fin.

I am the meanest

I am easily the meanest parent by far in my Academic Book Club (the Dotytron too, by extension).  Last night we talked about allowances and one of our member's issues with telling her 9 year old that just because so-and-so has an iPod touch it doesn't mean that she'll be getting her own.

You know what I tell the Big Yam when he says that something is "mine" (as in his)?  I say to him, "Nothing in this house is yours.  It's MINE.  You don't own anything.  You didn't earn it."  LOL!

Then we got onto the subject of chores and I was saying that the Big Yam's job since he's been just under two or so is to feed the cats in the morning and at night (and to set the table).  Book Club was impressed and one of the members says, "Maybe I'll try that with my daughter.  Give her a sense that making an effort to help out around the house counts."  And I was all, "Uhhh, HOLD THE FARM.  Making an effort DOESN'T COUNT.  The job has to be done right," and I told them about how when the Big Yam spills the cat food on the floor (which he did for a few days on purpose because he liked the sound or mess or something), I made him pick up each and every piece and put it back in the bin.  

In the Dotytron-Lagerfeld house, making a superficial effort ISN'T ENOUGH.  We are firm believers that kids have to be enticed (read: forced) to do things that they dislike, or that are hard, or that are unpleasant, and they do them to a certain standard because eventually, they push through and discover that doing so is intrinsically rewarding.  The Dotytron's entire job is based around dealing with kids who have been told their whole lives that lip-service "effort" and "trying" is enough.  Then these parents send their kids to schools and leave teachers to deal with their messes.  That's not okay.  Not in our books.

In my house growing up, we never had our own money.  There was no allowance, no money for chores.  You did your tasks (and please note, the kids in my family did A LOT - like, when we went on family trips, my mum and Big D would NEVER, EVER, EVER carry their own luggage...my mum bore 4 children so she would have 4 bellhops.  Heck, when I was a kid, my mum would make us carry her purse because even doing that was too taxing for her) because that's just how it was.  Everyone had a role in making sure the family functioned and the parents' role was to earn money and put a roof over our heads and food in our bellies and the kids' role was basically to do whatever your parents told you to do.  If I had even asked for an allowance my mum and Big D would have 1) yelled at me; then 2)  asked me why I thought I needed my own money when they provided everything I needed/required and if I wanted more, all I had to do was ask (with the knowledge that I would more often than not get turned down).  

The idea of my kid coming home and whining about "So-and-so has an iPod touch and why can't I have one wahwahwah" is appalling to me.  I'd be like, GO LIVE WITH SO-AND-SO'S PARENTS THEN, YOU INGRATE.  Exceptionalism is a combination of innate personality and also being pushed.  You don't get to become a driven, motivated individual by getting iPod touches and whatever the heck crap else you decide in your pea-brained head you want.  

Then my friend C asked about whether the other book club members eat together consistently as a family.  JJ and I were the only ones who said yes.  Everyone else was in the trap of cooking separate meals of what the kids would like to eat and then eating another meal themselves of what they wanted.  I just...don't have the time or inclination to do that.  We always ate together as a family growing up and I really believe in family meal time as an important focal point for the day - especially with today's families, when you're all careening off in different directions for 10+ hours every day - I think it's vital to forge those connections and centre yourselves around the table.  Dinner is the meal I look forward to all day, so the idea of eating whatever bland food my kid might want is not for me (in my case, the "bland" food would be super-spicy Indian food, but that's neither here nor there).  Also, by the end of the day, I'm lucky if I have enough gas to get through dinner, clean-up, a bit of play, stories, bed, and gearing up to do it all over again (to say nothing for an hour for my own pursuits), so the logistics of making two meals is simply not in the cards.

Part of the reason I subscribe to Baby-Led Weaning is because of this idea that's central to it - you have to take a macro, long-range view of what your kid is eating and trust that they self-regulate. So yes, the Big Yam wasn't a super-fan of the clam linguine, but over the course of two weeks, he's getting the protein, carbs, vegetables, and essential vitamins and minerals that he needs.  Especially given the varied menus that I construct, if the Boobla has bits and pieces, the long-range view is that he's getting what he needs.

Anyway, they were all APPALLED when I told them that one of the things we do when the Big Yam is misbehaving at the dinner table (throwing food on the floor, being disruptive, screaming about being done when we're not done eating) is turn his high chair around and basically, disallow him from being part of the table.  They were shocked and basically thought I was a monster.  But here's my rationale: I think that participating in the dinner table (with the dinner table as a microcosm for society as a whole) is a privilege that requires you as an individual to accept the rules of behavior that are part of your social contract with the other members of your family/dining companions.  Failure to exhibit acceptable behavior  and respect for your dining companions means that you get taken out of the situation until such time as you're ready and able to resume upholding your end of the contract in good faith.  The Dotytron is such a fan of the practice that he thinks we should continue it into like, adulthood.  Can you imagine a teenager with his back to the table, being all like, "I can HEAR YOU RIGHT NOW"?  It's pretty funny.

So my friend JJ was like, the way that we do things might work for us, but it won't work for everyone, because some kids will starve themselves to death.  And in my head (and this is how I'm a horrible person), I was like, well, if the kid doesn't even have that most basic of survival instincts, don't they kinda deserve to die?  It's like this Louis CK bit that another lady was talking about last night; she went to see him do stand-up and he apparently said this thing about how, have you ever considered that kids with peanut allergies are meant to die from exposure to peanuts?  Hahahaha.  So dark.  

I dunno.  I just finished reading a book about kids living in slums in Mumbai who sometimes have to eat frogs and rats fished out of the sewage lake on their slums.  If those kids can eat that, then a middle class kid in the developed world can stomach something other than plain pasta, methinks.

Here's the thing they don't see though: when it is time for play, or fun, the Dotytron and I go WHOLE HOG.  Like, we ramp up the fun in direct proportion to how hard we come down.  This is one of the discipline-y things the Dotytron learned in this book he read a couple of years back on classroom management.  The idea being that you basically don't want it to be a carrot or stick situation.  You want to get to the point where the kid governs him/herself (shades of Foucault!) out of the desire to continue to be able to do fun/awesome/happy things.  The disciplinary mechanism should fade into the background.  It's not overly censorious - you try not to react (like, don't get into a screaming match, don't raise your voice).  Instead, it's more like you're so bored by the kid's disobedience/acting out that you present this impassive, stony, façade while simultaneously and immediately ceasing the fun thing you had been doing.  Few things rattle kids like impassivity.  We also try to treat the Yam like a sentient, rationale being with agency and we appeal to his reasonableness.  We do this by, for example, telling him that he has to stay sleeping in his own crib all night and that we are here, and we would never let anything happen to him, and that we love him.  We also do that couples-therapy thing where we acknowledge his emotions at that moment, "I know you're mad/angry right now" "I know you want to do XYZ right now and you're frustrated because you can't" but still explain why the way he's expressing those emotions aren't appropriate.  

That's really just a long way of saying that me and the Dotytron are hella fun.  I make myself look like a giant goon by chasing the Big Yam around doing monster-face or pretending to be an alligator with my arms as big snapping jaws running around after him in the summer.  The Dotytron jams with him all the time or will spend sooo long at the play kitchen engaging in imaginary play or building trains.  The other night, we made this giant fort in our living room and the Big Yam's face when he went in...I wish I had a picture...he was beaming with this pure, open-mouthed smile of joy while we turned off all the lights and read stories by flashlight and told secrets.  

So yeah, I'm pretty mean.  But I can be pretty fun sometimes, too.  

This is a Yam-heavy post, y'all.  You've been warned.  Here are some things that happened on the weekend:

Offering Elmo a hot dog

Still Life With Hot Dog

These two run the worst kitchen in town.  You don't get anything you ask for, food falls on the floor and that walk-in is a s**tshow.

Trying to break into Bert & Ernie's apartment building.  Smallest, most persistent J-Hos ever.

This is what the fashion magazines would call "a look."  Crown, fuzzy jammies, and matching yellow high heels.

The Big Yam reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar.  Sorry our house is the most low-lit ever.  That look he gives at the 35 second mark after running through that epic list of foods is classic Yam.

The roomie came over for dinner tonight and brought a lasagne she had made.  YESSSSSSS...MADE-BY-OTHERS-LASAGNE!!!  We had it with a caesar salad and leftover peanut butter cookies and chocolate chip blondies JJ brought to book club.

Fin.

In Case You Were Wondering

...those honky grandmas still be trippin'. J/k! J/k!

Academic Book Club was Thursday night.  In which I got trotted out to the recently gutted and renovated GIANT downtown Victorian home of another Book Club member, a home that makes Lil' Ugmo look BEYOND ugmo.  4 levels, Sub Zero fridge (!!!), Montauk sofa (!!!), in-wall modern fireplace (!!!), those bleached grey hardwood floors, finished basement, yoga room/gym.  OY.  How am I supposed to host after seeing all that?!

Then you talk to these ladies and it's just...I do love them dearly but sometimes I can't believe how different we are.

We read Zadie Smith's NW, which I really disliked (full review to come).  To me, the book seemed to be white, New York Times reading, benevolent intellectual bait.  Like there was a checklist of post-colonial literature traits being offered up and fetishized for a white, privileged gaze.  Of course, this lead to talk about The Wire.  I feel like hearing some of them talking about The Wire perfectly encapsulates my discomfort with the way The Wire has been taken up.  It can be so self-congratulatory at times, like, I get it.  This is what IT'S REALLY LIKE and now I'm a privileged insider! - when the issues of poverty, the choices people in those situations make, the crumbling school system, even something as small as the culture and style and the music are so far removed from your reality.  And that's not to say that you can't appreciate it, but that you have to be mindful that your appreciation isn't based on a fetishized, reified notion of those lived realities.  So that you're not using them so that you can cluck and bemoan from the safety of your existence which is so far removed from theirs.  That you don't fix them in that state.

At one point in the discussion, one of the members was talking about how the Toronto District School Board is crumbling and how Palmerston Junior P.S. is feeling the effects of no money.  That school is in the Annex.  THERE IS NO WAY THEY ARE DIRECTLY FEELING THE EFFECTS OF TDSB FUNDING SHORTFALLS.  The Dotytron's school?  Yes.  I can buy it.  At Palmerston, the kids do Shakespeare with full costumes and sets (it's a JUNIOR school), and one of the Annex artsy playwright parents in the 'hood does the staging.  C'maaan.  Don't act like you know firsthand about inequities.  Your kids live such privileged lives!!  You're the ones fretting about getting into a "good school" district and buying a house where they'll have access to such.  You can't even get your kid to keep their mittens on, and look at me askance when I ask, "Can't you threaten them?" (which is totally legit.  The Big Yam totally keeps his mittens on and puts on his hat, because he knows his little keister is going to get hauled back inside pronto if he takes them off...AND I CAN WAIT ALL DAY).  Do we all have these contradictions?  Of course we do.  BUT ACKNOWLEDGE THEM!

Ugh.  "I don't understand how Rob Ford can win an election! It's all the suburbs' fault!"  (Newsflash: that patronizing attitude is COMPLETELY why).  When's the last time you guys ever ventured to Dufferin and Lawrence?  Or Scarborough?  Or Flemingdon Park?  Or Fairview Mall?  Stop acting like you know what's best for the people who live there and talking about your stupid plastic bag ban like THAT'S AN ISSUE THAT ACTUALLY MEANS ANYTHING FOR ANYBODY WHO HAS REAL PROBLEMS.  Also: stop talking about Rob Ford.  Who cares?  What power does the Mayor actually have?  It's one vote out of all the City Councillors.  Stop getting distracted and pay attention to the issues that actually matter and that will actually help you accomplish the goals you need to accomplish.

Then talk turned to General Petraeus and they started on the generally accepted liberal attitude that is like, "who cares what goes on in people's private lives!"  The great unwashed with their prurient interests - it's like Clinton!  People getting swept up by scandals that distract from the real issues."  (P.S.: you're getting just as distracted from the real issues).  Here's my thing with the Petraeus thing.  HE WAS A GIANT NOOB ABOUT IT.  Same with Clinton.  Same with Adam Giambrone.  I can TOTALLY get fired from my job if I happen to be surfing the net on company time, using company computers, and looking at an art spread from Vogue that features boobs.  It doesn't happen generally, BUT IT CAN.  SO WHY CAN'T SOMEONE WHO HAD AN INTER-OFFICE AFFAIR AND BROUGHT THEIR MISTRESS INTO THE OFFICE TO HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH THEM BE FIRED?!????????  That's just being unprofesh.  I work really hard to protect my professional reputation, so why can't they?

I also feel like there's a disgusting, permissive sexism to it.  Like a very, "that's just what men do."  Uhhh...being a walking cliché is not just what men do.  I called out the book club on it, too.  I was like, guys, if you found out that I was being cheated on and that I stayed with the Dotytron, you would totally be all judgy judgy up in my grill about be me being a doormat and what a d**k the Dotytron is.  Cheating on your spouse is generally, pretty wrong in my books.  It means that someone shies away from making hard decisions, is selfish, and is a giant liar (this is separate from my views on nonmonogamy and polyamory).  Why do we want giant, dillweed liars in positions of power?  You know who I feel was unjustly vilified?  Elliot Spitzer.  That guy did it right - prostitutes at hotels.  He wasn't bringing those broads into work and doing it in the staffroom.

Finally, JJ was wondering about the stand-offishness of some of the SAHM moms at the daycare and me and J were like, "why do you want to be friends with moms?" which also got us some sidelong glances.  As I've always maintained, I don't want to be friends with someone who defines their self by one aspect of their personality.  Like, "I'm a knitter.  I'm a mom.  I'm a dog person."  The only time someone defining themselves with one trait would work is if they said, "I'm into the human condition."  Just do you.  Don't be a MOM.  People are nuanced, complicated, and interesting.  Honor that about yourself.  Don't be like that lady at the Drop-In Centre I know, who has three kids and can only talk about that.  The middle one recently just started school, so when I saw her at the Drop-In, I was like, "It must be so nice to only have one at home now!" and she's all like, "Uh-oh.  Oh no.  One is harder than three.  I always say that.  One at home is so much more difficult than having three."  And in my head I'm like, RELAX, LADY.  Just own your life!  Don't be so passive-aggressive defensive about it!  So you're at SAHM with one at home.  That's cool, yo!  It's not cool when you wear your insecurities on your sleeve and try to convince me of something that I know for a fact defies the laws of physics.  This is the same mom who is Chinese but has mixed-race kids.  So she "only" speaks Cantonese to her kids.  She does the same with the Big Yam when J brings him to that drop-in.  Guys, her Chinese IS THE WORST.  It basically sounds like this:

Her accent is soooooooo bad!  I'm kinda like, "Uhhhh...could you NOT speak your butchered Cantonese to my kid, please?" It's kind of hilares, really.

Last night's pre-Academic Book Club meal was chili & fixins again.

Friday night the Big Yam got to pick our dinner (Advent Activity #7) but since he's not good at articulating, well...much of anything...we got takeout from Moti Mahal because we knew that if he could articulate his desires, he would want to eat Indian food and not, like, "IPad. Picture. Moon. Please" (which was one of his answers when we tried to ask him).  The little dude is SUPER into this awesome solar system/space app right now and his favorite thing is looking at "picture moon" and then telling us that "sun star."  I CAN'T HANDLE IT, GUYS.  HE'S GETTING INTO SCIENCE!!!

The food was sooooo good.  Their samosas are the flakiest/crispiest!  Samosas, parathas, garlic naan, and 4 curries (goat saag, butter chicken, channa, and sadhar paneer) for $32!

WEEKEND!

Fin.

Wait - who loves you?

It kind of blows my mind that when kids hit a certain age they go through a phase of getting night terrors or nightmares.  On Monday night, the Big Yam woke up screaming and crying at 3am and it was tragic. He was saying stuff like, "Baba...light!" and "Mama, help me!" (Seriously, is your heart breaking?  Mine did.)  When he's gotten upset in the past, I generally just give him squishes and then run through the list of people who love him, "Mama loves you, Baba loves you, Nana loves you, Poh Poh loves you," etc.  Recently he's started doing it himself, except it sounds like "Mama lalloo, Baba lalloo...." Super-cute, right?  Well I noticed that not too long ago he started adding his own peeps in to the mix:

That's right.  Dora loves you.  Boots loves you.  

He sometimes includes Map and Backpack too.  Man, the allure of that little Latina is impossible to resist!  Every kid goes down the Dora the Explorer rabbit hole.  I know that J sometimes lets the kids watch a bit of TV while she's getting lunch ready but I'm not fussed about it.  He doesn't get it at home and the lady has to get lunch ready!  I'm glad he's getting his popular culture there and not asking for it with us.  The other night the Dotytron was watching old Buster Keaton movies with the Big Yam and they were having a blast.  

Tuesday night's dinner of braised tilapia with chorizo (which actually wasn't chorizo), arugala, and tiny gem tomatoes from my CSA with orzo.  So good!  

Tonight is Academic Book Club.  We read Richard Ford's Canada.  This book was THE WORST!  I was literally angry loud-flipping through pages on the TTC and doing a dramatic sigh as I speed-skimmed the whole thing because I was so mad that I was wasting valuable reading time with this dreck.  You will find that my opinion is not shared.  Jane Urquhart wrote a glowing review of this for The Globe and Mail (assuming you put any credence in The Globe and Mail's culture reviews - I do not), and The New York Times was similarly favorable.  They were taken with the writing style and the richness of the language and the voice of the protagonist - all of which were things I abhorred.  The story is told from the point of view of 15 year old Dell Parsons, who recounts how his parents' decision to rob a bank irrevocably set in motion a series of events that altered his life and the life of his twin sister, Berner.  The book opens with this line:  “First I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.”  Which is admittedly a cracker of a way to start a book.  TOO BAD IT TAKES LIKE 300 PAGES TO EVEN GET TO THE BANK ROBBERY.  So much set up!  So much exposition!  So much telling instead of showing!  Unlike other reviewers, I didn't think that the author inhabited the mind of a 15 year old boy at all.  I thought as a reader, the characters' motivations and interior selves was maddeningly opaque. You'd get sentences like (and I'm paraphrasing here), "He always refused to believe that other people could think differently from him," or "As was in keeping with his tendency to blah blah blah," and I hated it.  I hated being forced to rely on the observations of this (too-reliable?) narrator.  You never question people's motivations because the protagonist tells you what to think and what they're thinking and there was no room for my imagination to fill in the gaps.  I can't tell you how much I didn't want to or didn't enjoy reading this book.  It was epically bad.  

We're doing a Canada-themed party for one of our members who recently became a Canadian citizen - so I made butter tarts.  I'm also meeting up with Dr. Rei beforehand for a nice little ramen & bootie-shopping session.  So excited about that.  

While I'm waiting for Laini Taylor's next instalment in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy to be released (November 2nd! Can't wait!), I've got the following in my queue: the new Jonathan Tropper, The Book Thief, and Beautiful Ruins.  

Day off tomorrow!  Woot.

Fin.

Super moons and more!

I need a weekend to recover from this weekend.  AND IT WAS A THREE DAY WEEKEND FOR ME.  WTF?  Only the craziest weekend in crazytown!

Thursday night Academic Book Club was interesting.  There was a lot of discussion about sexuality and, as the majority of the members (all save one) are parents, how to talk to your daughters about their sexuality.  I don't know if it's a generational divide or something, but I'm way more laissez-faire about it all.  The other women were much more like, "guys just want to take a girls virginity!" "teenage boys are so self-interested!" "girls get pressured into doing things!" which isn't necessarily untrue, but I think it structures the narrative in a very specific way.  Maybe it's because I have a son, maybe not, but I personally think it creates a very narrow field of possibilities in terms of how an adolescent girl is going to come into her own sexually, if the language we use is that your virginity is "taken" from you, and that boys are out to harm you.  Are there existing and pervasive power inequities that mean that women are figured as objects of desire, and that female identities are structured in terms of how they exist as objects for the male gaze?  Yes, 100% and that is deeply problematic.  At the same time though, we have to teach women that there is such a thing as a healthy sexual world-view and not send them into the world with a fear-based mentality.

First of all, your virginity isn't a big thing.  You're not "pure" and then suddenly, "not."  As my friend said, losing your virginity (or your first real sexual experience) can best be described as: "painful, awkward, and uncertain."  LOL!  So true!  There was talk in the Book Club about how the S&M elements in Maidenhead (the teenage girl protagonist gets peed on) victimized women and that lead me, raised as I am on a healthy diet of Savage Love columns, to query whether women could actively participate in submissive sexual behaviour and still be agents.  I say yes, a lot of the women thought no.  It was a really interesting discussion and it showed again, how much and how deeply I differ from these ladies.  But it's all good...they need me around to shake them up and I need them around to know how to be like, tactful and explain slang and stuff.

Friday I kept the Big Yam home with me in the morning and then I dropped him off with J at the drop-in centre.  It's so funny how out-of-context parents make kids go crazy.  He was being weirdly clingy and not himself, but it was cute.  He played at the water table and was showing off a bit.  I absolutely love kids in smocks.  It makes me die inside from the cuteness of it.  Then I had a massage, whereupon I learned that not stretching after running means that you contemplate rolling off the massage table in a feat of gluteal-self-preservation when your RMT digs into your butt with her elbow.  My glutes are in trouble, sons!  Then we had dinner with the Roomie and L'Armi at their place.  We ordered Greek delivery and it was good and tasty and we had a good, low-key time.  We basically just laid around on their king-sized bed and played with all their massage toys.  It sounds super-lame but it was the best.  We also thought up a wicked name for their bambino (they're having naming issues).  Wait for it: Capleton.  BEST!  LOL!  Way easier to integrate than say, Sizzla, which was our other pick.

Saturday was buckwild.  I took the Big Yam grocery shopping, then we went to KW for Jenny Calendar & Tillers' daughter's 1st birthday party!  It was a big deal, yo!  Colour scheme, a huge spread, lots of friends and kids toddling about.  Super cute and super-fun.  The Big Yam was doing his standard thing of petting other kid's heads and then trying to go in for a kiss.  It's his calling card.  Then SMckay drove us home.  We ended up missing the documentary because we left the party late and there was some rubbernecking business on the 401, but it worked out in the end because I got to get SMckay settled.  She ended up meeting like, all my neighbours.  It was cute.

The Dotytron and I saddled up and biked to the Brickworks for the TUM Street Food Block Party.  We met up with MHui and her hubby R there.  It was crazytown!  People were lining up for some of the food trucks for like, 2 hours!  So MHui and I got in line for these lobster rolls from the Rock Lobster Food Co.  It was like a 20 minute wait and MHui said we were getting static from some b**ches in front of us who were being grumbles and talking like we had cut in line or that the people behind us were really with them or something.  So I started getting a little static-y back at them.  At one point, I looked behind us and was like, "whoa, that line just grew like, exponentially!  We got in at a good time!" Then we linked back with the boys with our lobster poutine and lobster rolls and it turns out THAT WE HAD TOTALLY CUT IN LINE.  LOL!  Whoops!!!  No wonder we were getting static from other people!  MHui had another friend who'd been waiting TWO HOURS for her food!!!  Hahahaha...best-slash-worst.  The boys were pretty useless.  While we were waiting for our lobster sammies they came strolling up with beer so we told them to go stand in line at another stand and get something.  We turn around 10 minutes later and they're standing a little ways away from us, chiefing it up and drinking their beer and MHui is like, "did they get food?  I know they didn't get food!" and we go back to them and OF COURSE they didn't get food.  They choked up under the pressure.

We had the lobster stuff, a huitlacoche (a fungus that grows on corn) taquitos, a cochinita pibil slider, this AMAZING Indonesian food (beef rendang in a little egg pancake, this awesome veggie-stuffed deep fried tofu with peanut sauce, yellow curry chicken wings), water buffalo banh mi, cornbread grilled cheese, doughnuts (these were meh, not fresh) and got some cupcakes and cake in a jar to go.  The boys had a bunch of craft beers and some tequila.

I was getting mad, though.  Two reasons:

1) The TUM organizers are exploiting the vendors!  You have to pay to get in and then pay for your food and drink on top of it.  Tickets were $20.  They were expecting around 3000 people.  That means TUM made like, $60,000 in one night!  FOR WHAT?!?  There's a tonne of volunteers, they had to pay to rent the Brickworks, some advertising, security, insurance, and special event liquor license.  Bogus!  PLUS, the vendors have to pay a registration fee of $200!  That's what was the most galling.  I was telling them, "you should rebel! This is outrageous!  They're making money on your backs!" and MHui was like, "are you trying to start a revolution, Katniss?"  LOL!  But it's true!  None of that profit goes to the vendors.  If it was me, I'd do like a "People's Choice" award or something and then give the winner $10,000 or something.

2) I know the point of TUM is that it gives amateur cooks exposure...but the amateurishness of the amateur cooks was galling.  There was no sense of urgency!  How do you see like, a wall of 150 people in front of you and you're still moving like you're just making yourself a Sunday afternoon afternoon sammy?  C'MON! I so wanted to jump behind the line at points and start like, expediting or pumping out the orders.

All in all, I don't know if I would go back.  When they first started TUM was $5 admission.  That's fair.  $20 is pushing it.

We rode our bikes there and the Dotytron had the brilliant idea for us to ride our bikes down Bayview back.  Ummmmm...Bayview is like, DVP-lite.  There is NO shoulder and so you have to ride in a car lane and cars are going by you at like, 70 or 80 and honking and not expecting you to be there.  I was like, screaming at him at the top of my lungs going, "I AM NOT COMFORTABLE WITH THIS!  GET OFF!  I DON'T LIKE THIS!!!!!!" and so we got off at the first available opportunity (which are few and far between on Bayview).  So it's not super-accessible, either.

And...the Dotytron got food poisoning.  He woke up at 2am with the scoots and the brafing.  It was bad.  Poor guy.  I have an iron stomach so I was fine.  The good thing is, SMckay was an awesome babysitter and allowed us to have a fun night out.  We also saw the super moon on our way home and it was amazing and so we gave it a 3-ring salute on our bike bells.  The super moon is kinda bada**, guys.

Sunday I let the Dotytron sleep in and did mad sensory play with the Big Yam.  We basically spent the whole day outside.  I mulched the garden and had the Big Yam sitting in his bean tub (but filled with the cocoa shell mulch) outside with me.  Then in the afternoon I filled the tub with water and food colouring so he could play in the water.  Then all the neighbours were outside and the kids were talking and playing together...it was super-cute.  SMckay came back from her date with the philanthropist to pick up her car  and like, knew everyone, just from being out the night before.  It was cute.  I really, really, really love my 'hood.  We're talking about this year's Street Party already.  We ended up having to cancel our planned dinner with Lolly on account of the Dotytron's gut being all sensitive.

This is the look the Big Yam is gonna be running with all summer.  LOL!  He looks like baby Hunter S. Thompson.  We almost got him mini-Ray Bans in NYC but I didn't want to spend the money and then I found these sunny g's at store in Toronto.  They're hilarious.

This morning was a gong show.  Applications for the TDSB job postings are all due today by 4pm.  The Dotytron found out this morning he has an interview way out in the west end.  I worked night shift so it was a mad scramble figuring out who was gonna pick up the Big Yam.  Thankfully these occasions are few and far between but it was still a bit of an "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" morning.  I hope the Dotytron gets an interview and gets one of the jobs closer to home.  Having to drive cross-town every day would really make things difficult for us!

Momma D picked up the Big Yam and I ended up ordering us pizza to make dinner time easy tonight.

Fin.

"Please be up when I get home...

...I will help you fold the laundry.  We will watch Game of Thrones together." - excerpted from an email I wrote to the Dotytron yesterday.  I joke that those should've been our vows.  Instead we went with this:

Sometimes, I forget just how funny our performance was.  LOL!  The other memory that had me in stitches recently - post-wedding, post-bbq lunch, all the parents and grandparents had gone to the hotel or gone shopping, and it was goosetang and Team Geneseo and my brothers left.  We had all paired up to play bocce, and we made the "punishment" for losing a face dip in the galvanized barrel of ice water we had for the beer.  She lost and we all started playing another round and then I hear Bwong laughing, going, "Dr. Rei, no!" because she's kneeling in front of the bin, in her post-wedding-still-garden-party finery, about to dip her nose in the icy water.  It makes me laugh, still.  What a lovely day that was.

The Queen of Versailles was an amazing doc.  So nuanced and rich, it was fascinating and sad and enlightening all at once.  It follows David and Jackie Siegel.  David is the owner of the largest privately owned timeshare company in the world.  He's amassed a fortune, married a former Mrs. Florida, Jackie, has 8 kids with her, and together they were building the single largest private family residence in America, modeled on Versailles, natch.  They're in the middle of building it when the mortgage crisis happens in the US in 2008 and then all their money goes away (that's simplistic, but you get the idea).  The documentarian just caught them at the best time - she started filming when they were at their height (I think the doc was originally supposed to be about the house itself) and then caught the Siegels as they struggled through the lack of liquidity caused by the collapse of their business.  It's a stunning documentary.  For one, it makes you feel strangely sympathetic to the Siegels, and especially Jackie.  Yes, she's a blond Amazonian with ginormous fake boobs, but she also loves her kids, is generous, and came up poor and just got used to this life.  One of their kids is Jackie's niece, Jonquil, who grew up poor and her parents couldn't take care of her so Jackie adopts her.  Jonquil sagely notes in the documentary something along the lines of how even though she's been poor and now has everything she could want, servants, any material possession, you somehow get used to it.  Like, she can't remember any other way.  It sounds awful when you write that and the documentarian cleverly problematizes the ignorant, careless greed and conspicuous consumption of the Siegels, by interviewing their chauffeur (who lost his house to foreclosure) and 1 of their 3 nannies (who hasn't seen her biological son in 19 years).  And yet, the film does a clever job of showing how that aspirational greed that is so uniquely an American product is expressed at all levels.  The banks refuse to continue to lend David Siegel money to keep his business afloat because they want him to foreclose so they can get the asset (his buildings), so he has to lay off 7000 people.  David Siegel's entire fortune was built on selling average, middle-income Americans a timeshare dream they couldn't afford (he was essentially selling subprime).  It's fantastic.  I'm sure it'll get distribution so I would highly recommend you catch it.

We've been doing pretty well for Hot Docs so far!  

Tonight is Academic Book Club.  I've read everything, though it damned near killed me.  The worst reading was Tamara Faith Berger's Maidenhead.  She's the former sex columnist for Vice Magazine and her erotic fiction centres on the sexual awakening of a teenage girl that delves into race and politics through the employment of Hegel's master-slave dialectic (I know.)  I wasn't super into the voice of the book, which had the fuzzied, clinical detachment of a Margaret Atwood novel.  Not for me.  I also didn't really have much time to think through the connotations about Hegel, self-consciousness, race (the protagonist's sexual awakening comes at the hands of an older Tanzanian man and his girlfriend), and power (there's a fair amount of what could be construed as traditionally "degrading" acts like being urinated on and slapped).  I just wasn't in the mood for it and didn't care enough, to be honest.  This was meh.  I guess I don't want a lecture about sexual politics.  I'm kinda past that, ya know?

Speaking of erotica, you might have heard everyone going buck for Fifty Shades of Grey which is this new erotic series that is taking the world (and by "world," I mean "desperate housewives and Twilight fanboy mothers") by storm.  So I checked it out.  It's AWFUL.  It's started out as Twilight fan fiction and it shows. It's painfully bad with awful, clunky writing (on par with Twilight, actually!)  I can't even describe how bad what little I read is.  Standard story - mawkish, awkward yet stunningly beautiful girl comes under the thrall of a super debonair (but vapid), vaguely menacing businessman who ravishes her and becomes to the dom to her sub.  SHE CAN'T RESIST HIM.  Barf x 1000000000.  There, you know what's going on.  Now you can talk about it knowledgeably with the biddies at work without having to suffer through it yourself.

Seriously, just pick up a John Green book already, aight?

So I won't be home again tonight.  Kind of sadface about it.  Last night, the Dotytron and the Big Yam planted his bean together in the garden.  Bummed I missed it, but I did have a nice time with my ladies.  So I'm glad I went.  

Looking forward to my day off tomorrow!!  I'm starting a new policy of keeping the Big Yam home with me during the day and then dropping him off (like a sack of cocaine at the Tijuana border) with J at the drop-in centre so I get the afternoons to myself.  It's a good compromise, methinks.  The roomie has pretty much started her maternity leave so we're going to hang with her during the day and then I'm treating myself to a massage (and doing some house cleaning - boo).

Fin.