I have a Charlie Brown fake Christmas tree.  It’s short, and its branches are sparse and papery.  For the past few years, I’ve hidden the metal foot of the tree by swathing it with an old bath towel.  I’ve tried to use holiday colors, but there have certainly been seasons when my tree was skirted in aqua and white.

My tree does not deserve this, even if its branches are sparse and papery.

So I decided that this year I would procure a tree skirt.  I started poking around Target, but didn’t find anything I particularly liked.  And then I saw exactly the tree skirt I wanted at Crate and Barrel — called the Cheers Tree Skirt — and it even came in a Charlie Brown Christmas tree miniature size!  (See Figure 1)  Unfortunately, this tree skirt was something like $50, and I am unwilling to pay that much for a piece of spangled fabric cut into a circle.

This is when I decided to get crafty.  The Cheers Tree Skirt doesn’t seem all that complicated, and so I’ve been making one on my own. After my mandatory few hours glaring at my dissertation, I headed to Michael’s, land of excessive scrapbooking materials and pipe cleaners, to pick up some supplies: felt, buttons, a darning needle, some metal brads shaped like snowflakes, and felt glue.

For less than $20 and a few hours with a pair of scissors, I think I’ll end up with a tree skirt that at least vaguely resembles the Crate and Barrel version and, perhaps, has a little more homey character.  It’s not even close to done yet, and I think it’s going to take longer than anticipated.  But really, it’s just as well.  That will be a few evenings’ worth of distraction from the job market.

I’ve documented my progress for the pleasure of all carrots readers!

my materials, ready to go

I'm irrationally proud of my embroidery floss.

buttons!

finding the center

 

the first few doo-dads

coming along

I decided to add a poinsettia.

I’ll post a picture when it’s done!

 

 

 

New pick by carrots!

I’m currently in a holding pattern.  It’s the end of November, and many universities and colleges call job candidates to schedule MLA interviews in early- to mid-December.  Sometimes a little earlier.

So I’m waiting.  I tend to startle when the phone rings, jumping up to answer only to discover that it is, again, the Fraternal Order of Police, who seem to somehow intensify their fundraising efforts during job market season.  Every time I hear the familiar ding of my email notifier, I hold a small, faint hope that it is a school asking for an interview or supplemental materials.  I’ve had three small nibbles, which is heartening, but nothing definitive yet.

Before I went on the job market, I didn’t consider waiting to be an active occupation, but I have learned that this sort of high-stakes anticipation engages at least half of my brain at all times, making it impossible for me to concentrate on anything else with my full attention.  At the end of the day, I’m exhausted.  From waiting.  I am tired from doing nothing.  Is this what upper-class Victorian women felt, after a day of embroidery and reading aloud in the drawing room?

The good news is that I’ve turned in all of my applications.  I think.  I’m still checking the job lists, and something new may appear, but tomorrow I’m going to wake up, go for a jog, and sit down at my desk to work instead of wait.  I am determined to make progress!

So I apologize for the infrequent blogging, but really, do you want to hear more of this whining?  Hopefully I’ll get at least one interview in the next two weeks, an interview that will act as a security blanket that I will cling to in moments of despair.

Grad school.  Bah.

 

Bee, my best friend from high school, and her husband, Brian, recently went away for a weekend.  While they were away, their cat Juniper somehow escaped their apartment and wandered the halls of their building until a neighbor scooped her up and called Bee and Brian at 2 am to apprise them of the situation.  How Juniper escaped the apartment, which was locked, remains a mystery.  No landlord or maintenance worker had opened the door.

I’m beginning to entertain the possibility that Junie has superpowers and is able to teleport, like Nightcrawler of the Uncanny X-Men.  (Danny tells me that, coincidentally, Kitty Pryde of the X-Men can walk through walls, so perhaps this is a uniquely feline power.)

Perhaps someday the Great Junie Caper will be solved.  I’m hoping that Bee discovers a trace of foreign soil, some suspect cat prints on a window ledge — a scrap of evidence that will led her to discover, Sherlock Holmes-style,  the true nature of Junie’s escape.

Because solving small, quotidian mysteries like this one is just so satisfying.

For example:  When I was an undergraduate, I took a fiction writing workshop.  One of the stories a fellow student circulated was riddled with typos.  It wasn’t a rogue letter here or there, or a case of the computer’s over-zealous and often-mistaken auto-correct function.  These were aggressive, multi-letter typos.  I began to circle them, trying to identify a pattern.  Was this intentional?  A strange, modernist experiment — a meta-commentary on standardized spelling?

No.

This student — we’ll call him Tim — had apparently named the hero of his tale after himself.  When he had finished drafting the story, he had renamed the character Brad.  Instead of reading through the story and manually changing the name each time it appeared, Tim had used the “Find and Replace” tool in Word.  Unfortunately, he had not checked that small, crucial box telling his computer to “Find whole words only.”  The computer therefore replaced the series of letters T-I-M, wherever it occurred, with B-R-A-D.  The result:  His story didn’t take place “once upon a time.”  It took place “once upon a Brade.”  The dragon did not “intimidate” the hero of our tale.  It “inBradinated” him.

The entire debacle was made only more ridiculous by the fact that this story was an over-the-top humorous adventure tale.  Tim had cast himself as a machismo, stallion-riding, bad-ass, ladies man.  And then he’d realized that this might seem ridiculous in the cold, fluorescent lights of a college classroom and made the embarrassing, botched switch.

No one mentioned the situation during the workshop, although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who noticed.  Our silence was a kind silence, an unspoken consensus to overlook and ignore, to save the dignity of a classmate.  Still, I was so psyched that I had figured it out.  Jazz hands!

It’s comforting, this sense that, amid the chaos, we can restore order.  We can go Encyclopedia Brown and make all of the evidence settle, suddenly and unexpectedly, into a cohesive narrative.  Nothing cures the unsettling unpredictability of adult life like a small, satisfying AHA! moment.  Every once in a while we need that feeling of complete mastery, a small triumph to make us — at least internally — exclaim, BOO-YEAH!

I suspect that this is one of the reasons Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories were — and are — so popular.  And why so many people are addicted to those acronym shows like CSI and NCIS, where a sesame seed lodged underneath a victim’s thumbnail can lead to the one deli in town that sells bagels sprinkled with that precise species of sesame which leads, perhaps, to a sandwich-maker with a grudge and a violent streak.

It also explains the popularity of the movie Amelie.  Sure, the quirky cinematography, the indie cuteness of Audrey Tautou, the fantastic quip about artichoke hearts — all of these were selling points.  But most delightful was, perhaps, the series of small inconsistencies and mundane whodunits.  The photo booth bandit.  The box of boyhood trinkets hidden behind bathroom tile.  The glass-boned man painting the same scene over and over again.  The garden gnome with travel lust.

Who wouldn’t treasure that moment when the wanderings of your lawn ornament finally, beautifully, become clear?

 

 

Tonight for dinner, Danny and I had butternut squash soup (not made but purchased, overpriced, from Randall’s), loaded baked potatoes, and hot french bread.  I can feel the carbohydrates slowly mutating into midsection chub, but it was totally worth it.

I learned how to perfectly butter a baked potato from my dad, Mike “Boots” Ford, who is a master baked potato butterer.  (He is also a master potato masher, and his method involves an interpretive dance that surprises and often unsettles the uninitiated.)  The key to baked potato buttering, I learned from Boots, is that you must resist the sense of embarrassment you feel about exactly how much butter this task requires.  It’s a lot more than you would be willing to admit, and you just have to power through the shame and onto the deliciousness.  Because if you’re going to do the potato, you should do it right.

As I forked delicious butter into my spud this evening, I considered how many cooking essentials you learn from your family.  In addition to the butter thing, my dad has taught me how to make another Ford Family Essential: the egg-in-a-hole.  My Mamaw Ford taught me how to properly scrape every molecule of batter out of a mixing bowl and, through her matter-of-fact delivery of wives’ tale cookery, convinced me against all logic that I must always stir in one direction.  Failing to do so will unmix the batter.

And, of course, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my mom.  Kitchen time with mom wasn’t so much about recipes and measurements.  Sure, I learned how to mix the dry ingredients before adding the eggs and oil.  I learned how to ice a cake in thick scallops, never passing over the same spot twice.  And I learned that you always put some fresh-cut veggies and fruit on the Thanksgiving table, even if they remain relatively untouched next to the stuffing and turkey.  Someone is bound to want at least one gherkin, or perhaps a carrot stick.

But really, I learned one important thing:  This is all a learning process.  If you mess it up — well — either no one will notice, or you can start over.  And if it’s irreparable, you better just deal with it as soon as possible and get to that mental place where you can laugh at yourself.  There is really no reason to have a panic attack if you realize, once the cake is in the oven, that you forgot the vanilla.  Sometimes slapping Halloween stickers on Little Debbie snack cakes instead of whipping up something from scratch for your Brownie troop is fine.  And if it falls to the floor when no one is looking… well… just put it back on the plate.  No one will know the difference, as long as you double-check for dog hair.

This fall, when I realized that I had sent out an important fellowship application with a careless typo, I tried to remember mom in the kitchen.  Even when something seems so important, so last-chance, it’s still part of the learning process.  I remembered calling home during my parents’ maiden attempt to brine a turkey — that fateful day when the bird, in the brining bag, slipped from the counter and hit the floor.  The brine seeped through the tile and into the ceiling of the rec room below, shorting out some wiring and tripping the smoke alarm.  This brine warped the floor.

Sure, the brining incident seemed disastrous at the time.  But everyone lived through it, and now it’s part of the family mythology.

And really, next to rogue turkey brine, a typo is nothing.

 

A week or so ago I was reading an article by a scholar named Bruce Nadel in Children’s Literature that discussed nineteenth-century board games — richly decorated games with names like “Wallis’ Picturesque Round Game of Produce and Manufactures, of the Counties of England and Wales.”  With a title like that, the game seems foreign from anything you’d pick up from Toys ‘R’ Us today, but really — not so different.  Maybe a little more aggressive in its educational agenda, but the same neatly divided squares, the movement of a gamepiece forward through perils and holdups.

You have encountered a particularly beautiful view and must pause to take it in!  Skip a turn.

Encountering Wallis’ Picturesque Round Game made me consider those board games that were popular when I was a kid.  And I don’t mean Scrabble or Monopoly or any of the games that I might still break out today.  (Danny and I have an ongoing Scrabble WAR!).  I mean games specifically geared toward kids — cartoon characters on the box, a designation for ages six and up, usually pieces in primary colors.  Hi Ho Cherry-O and Connect Four and Chutes and Ladders.

Like Hungry, Hungry Hippos.  Remember Hungry, Hungry Hippos?  That is a game of focus.  There was that moment before the feeding frenzy began, your hand poised and trembling above your hippo’s black lever, ready to strike.  Your eyes were fixated and glassy, your nerves as taut as a sniper’s.  You were going to devour those marbles, dammit.  Once the action began it was a massacre of marbles, the deafening noise of plastic against plastic and, inevitably, the skidding of marbles on hardwood floor as a few choice morsels escaped under the couch.  Apparently there’s an “on-the-run” edition of the game that, as a safety measure, includes a plastic dome over the board to enclose rogue marbles.  Wimps.

And then there was Operation, a game designed to give children PTSD and, perhaps, premature heart attacks.  I had a love-hate relationship with that game.  A neat freak from a young age, I was attracted to the order and organization of the cardboard patient’s innards.  Each small, plastic ailment assigned its own place: the Brain Freeze, the Broken Heart, the Funny Bone.  But the dynamic of the game was really just terrifying — a group of kids kneeling over the board completely silent, holding their breath, while a young colleague shakily extended the tweezers.  Silence… silence… wait for it…  BZZZZZZZZZZZ!  I probably burst a few young, tender blood vessels.  I always prayed that I would have the opportunity to go for the wishbone, a game piece that was mercifully narrow and grab-able.

A friend across the street had Mousetrap, a game with enough small parts to asphyxiate an entire class of kindergartners.  It took so long to set up that, by the time we had snapped together the flimsy plastic scaffolding and precariously balanced the small, plastic bathtub at the top of the game’s complicated machinery we were ready to quit.  I’m not sure we ever played Mousetrap.  We set it up, dropped the marble, and trapped our vermin voluntarily, dreading the chore of figuring out how to fit all of those choking hazards back in the cardboard box.

It’s pretty amazing that so many of these games that I broke out on rainy days in the 80s are still around and selling.  Maybe I’ll amass a collection and host a game night.  Guess Who might be more fun after a few glasses of vino.

And remember, game pieces do not actually talk.

 

I’ve been a very delinquent blogger, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you.  I predict that I’ll be more attentive once I’ve gotten through round one of the application process.  (I’m still hopeful that round one followed by many, many more rounds that lead blissfully to a desirable tenure-track professorship.)  But, despite my scatter-brainedness, I have managed to update my weekly picks by carrots AND update my “currently reading” and “currently watching,” which I haven’t done in some time.

In between job market shenanigans, I’ve been trying to cobble together the introduction to my dissertation.  I saved the introduction until last because I wanted to have a clear idea about the majority of my project before I had to, you know, introduce it.  But this also means that I have saved until last a discussion of early children’s literature, a genre

Janeway's A Token for Children

that is either (a) mind-numbingly boring or (b) violent, offensive, and a little funny.  Perhaps the most famous of the latter is Mary Martha Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family (1818), in which a father, troubled by his children’s disobedience, takes them all into the woods to show them a rotted corpse hanging from a gibbet.  “See!” he implies.  “Your childish bickering will lead to nothing but death death death!“

 

There’s also A Token for Children by James Janeway, published in 1672.  Janeway’s book is meant to address the problem that children were “not too little to go to Hell,” and inside he provides many examples of the “joyful deaths” of good little Puritans.

And then there’s Henry Sharpe Horsley, whose The Affectionate Parent’s Gift (1828) includes “Scared Straight” didactic poems for children, including  “A Visit to Newgate,” in which two fathers take their sons to stare through the jail-bars at a young thief who is crying, hungry and depressed, and “A Visit to the Lunatic Asylum,” where a young boy learns that wow — it’s great to be sane!  I also love Horsley’s poem “School,” which includes a stanza exhorting the young reader that children who neglect to learn “must be whipt and scourg’d / They don’t deserve to eat.”

This particular trend in children’s literature also inspires some weird literary reviews and criticism. For example, I ran across this sentence in a nineteenth-century essay by a critic named Alexander Innes Shand–a sentence summarizing, apparently, a story by a Miss Fraser Tytler:

“When the ill-found ship was delayed by baffling winds, and all the passengers were generously sharing their shanty stores and resigning themselves to short rations, we well remember the incident of the greedy girl who feloniously swallowed a Bologna sausage, and was blighted before the hungry company by her aunt’s reproachful gaze.”

How often to you get to read a sentence like that?

And how can you read a sentence like that and not consider just how appropriate this story could be for kids — a story that involves “feloniously” swallowing an entire Bologna sausage?  I need to work that sentence into a conference presentation, just to hear the questions it inspires.

 

I was walking through downtown Houston with two friends a month or so ago when we passed a man muttering to himself and, if I remember correctly, taking out his childhood anger issues on a styrofoam cup.  We were on our way home, and one friend had parked in a different part of the city.  We offered to escort her to her car.  Because, you know.  Muttering man with violent tendencies.

“No, I’m fine,” she said.  “I have a taser.”  She noted this in a breezy manner, as if she was offering a stick of gum or commenting on the weather.

“Can I see it?” I asked.  Because when someone has a taser, you have to see it.

“Sure.”

And she did!  She had a taser in her purse.  So bad-ass.*  When she pushed the trigger to demonstrate its creep-aversion abilities, it produced a small arc of electric blue electricity with a sharp, satisfying crackle.  The man with the demolished cup, startled, found a different street corner.  When I asked how one comes by a taser, my friend informed me that you can buy them at any local sports supply store.  Perhaps between the volleyballs and junior soccer league shin guards?  More likely among the hunting rifles, perhaps.

I’m not a violent person.  I have never punched anyone, and I don’t really want to.  (I once slapped a classmate on the leg in elementary school, not even very hard, and it led to a fiasco of tears and humiliation, masterminded by an evil troll of a teacher.  And I don’t use those words lightly, as I come from a family of teachers and know how difficult it is to control a classroom.  Moving on.)  I have issues watching action and horror movies.  I was disturbed last night when my cats killed a ladybug.  But the power of the taser is appealing to me.  I don’t want to use it one on someone.  I  just want to carry it around with me and spark it up if a crazy cup man gets too close.  I don’t want a taser, I suppose.  I want the threat of a taser.

At least I thought I did.  I was discussing this over coffee this afternoon with another friend who did not witness the power of the taser.  This led to a consideration of all forms of self-defense often recommended to young women by worried parents.  Carry your keys laced through your fingers, so you can jab the sharp points at an attackers’ eyes.  Be prepared to scratch and, if necessary, bite.  If you’re going to kick, aim at the knees.  If you’re going to punch, aim at the throat or upward, into the nose.

“Danny always tells me that an ear can be ripped off pretty easily, with five pounds of pressure,” I add.  Another useful lesson from the army.

“Really?  Hmmm.”  My friend nods, considering.

“But then you have an ear in your hand,” I concede.  This has been a persistent concern for me, ever since Danny apprised me of the shocking vulnerability of the human ear.  “And what do you do with the ear?  Do you throw it at your attacker?  Do you thwap it on the ground and stomp on it?”

” Do you keep it as some sort of trophy?” she suggests.

” Or maybe you throw it away from you,” I decide, “into the bushes or across the street — because hopefully this person would go chasing after it?”

This is the problem with self-defense strategies.  I know what to do, but would I actually do it?  Do I want to be holding my attacker’s ear?  Would the adrenaline in the moment really push me to take that drastic and perhaps necessary step?  My friend has talked this over with her mother.  All of these precautions are useless, she said, if you can’t follow through.  You have to be able to imagine yourself taking a swing or a kick, to be in a mental space where it can happen, before you need to fight.

Which is hard to do.  Tasers are only bad-ass, I think, when you don’t have to use them.

___________________________________________________

*Not as bad-ass, of course, as Sandy’s bear mace.  But we can’t all be such renegades.

 

In the latest issue of Real Simple, there’s an article on breathing exercises.  When we’re feeling stressed or anxious, or when we’re just swept up in manic day-to-day responsibilities, the author tells us, we often take short, shallow breaths or even hold our breath completely.

I was skeptical at first, but then I spent yesterday (a particularly stressful day that involved much job-market gnashing of teeth) and today (much less stressful but filled with minute responsibilities) observing my breath.  I hold my breath ALL THE TIME.  I also clench my teeth.  I’m surprised I don’t keel over and swoon, Victorian heroine style.

[Really, not many Victorian heroines swoon.]

So I’ve decided to take a few moments a few times each day to observe my breath.  This is all very yoga class.  I’ve also started to lull myself to sleep by taking long, deep breaths that, supposedly, are exercising my diaphragm and inflating my stomach with peace, love, and fuzzy lambs.  All good feelings.  The article recommended that, while breathing in, I think of a positive word or circumstance, and while breathing out, I expel a negative feeling.  This is supposed to stop the whirling whirling stress madness that keeps many of us awake.  The author recommended that I inhale “peace” and exhale “stress.”

This is not specific enough for me.  I would prefer to inhale Arby’s roast beef sammiches (literally and figuratively) and exhale that jerkface who didn’t put away his grocery cart at Randall’s this afternoon.  Or maybe I could inhale a vision of me getting that-one-job-I-really-want and exhale November’s rent.  Inhale a Houston day less than 80 degrees.  Exhale the Roach: Texas Edition that greeted me when I came home last week.  (Make that half-a-roach, as the cats discovered it first.)  Of course, thinking this much about the positive things I’m inhaling and the negative things I’m exhaling defeats the purpose, and in my typical manner of aggressive organization I start to sort and tally the negatives and positives in the brightly colored fileboxes in my brain, all purchased at the mental equivalent of The Container Store.  How many roast beef sammiches would balance out, say, a snarky comment from a strange woman at the bookstore?

The breathing thing is important, obviously, and supposedly boosts your immune system and improves blood pressure and therefore heart health.  But for now, I think I’ll have to stick to my old method of falling asleep: reading until the words start swimming.

Now I really want a roast beef sammich.  Mmmmmmmmarbysroastbeefsammich.

 

[To my tens of dozens of readers: Below I discuss in detail my reactions to the new Where the Wild Things Are movie.  If you haven't seen it yet, there may be a few spoilers in here.  Most people are familiar with the broad sweeps of Max's journey in his wolf suit, but I'll be directing my icy, critical gaze on many of the additions Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers made to the story in order to transform a picture book into a feature film.]

So Fandango has a feature in which users try to communicate their intense or not-so-intense feelings for a movie in five words.  Most users seem to suggest — in their awkward phrases riddled with typos and bad grammar — relatively positive reactions to Where the Wild Things Are, adapted from Maurice Sendak’s picture book by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers.

My five word review? Sucked out all the joy.

I purchased my ticket for the movie knowing both that the film would necessarily expand upon the book in significant ways and that it was not particularly meant for kids.  Sure, it would attract the elementary set, but any savvy studio would know that adults who grew up reading Sendak’s book and poring over its cross-hatched illustrations  would be lining up at the AMC.  And I had heard some grumbling on the part of Jonze that it wasn’t a movie for kids!  It wasn’t a movie for adults!  It was a film! Or some such pretentiousness.

Regardless of the audience or purpose of the movie, what I did expect was some loyalty to what I consider to be the most powerful elements of the book.*  This is a story about a boy who negotiates and, quite literally, navigates through some pretty crappy circumstances — left undisclosed in the book but explained in really a quite touching way in the movie — through his imagination.  The great thing about exploring an island full of bird-legged, sharp-toothed monsters and declaring yourself of royal blood is that you can exert a degree of control.  Sure, life among the wild things isn’t always what Max expected, but the difference between his time in the wild and his time in his bedroom at home, forced into the humiliation of unfair time-out, is that in the forest he can manage and transform his world.  When you’re small, like Max, you control very little.  Sendak’s book has let millions of readers in on the secret that they can imagine alternate circumstances.

But Max in this movie has no control.  When he arrives on the island of the wild things, he finds himself swept up in the petty politics of a claustrophobic community of whiners, imbeciles, and head cases.  These are not wild things of the charmingly and perhaps a little frighteningly chaotic sort.  Their gnashing of teeth is not some excess of savage license.  They’re violent because they are deeply unhappy, lonely, and depressed.  They roll their eyes out of cruel sarcasm.  They call each other names and throw dirt clods at one another.  They literally tear off one another’s arms.  (This somehow got a lot of laughs, which I don’t understand.)  Max declares himself king, but the wild rumpus that follows — a chaos of shaky cinematography that pales in comparison to the moonlight parade of the book — is only over for a moment when the sinking depression returns and the annoying in-fighting commences.  He doesn’t love me anymore.  She took my stick.  You’re cheating, and I’m going to take my rumpus and go home.  Oh, and on my way out, I’m going to step on your face.  Literally.

The awkward tension only grows, and things finally are so insupportable that Max decides to call it quits and leave the island.  If he stays, the popcorn-eating viewer concludes, surely he will have to commit suicide.  Exit, indeed, is the best option.  So Max leaves in defeat, longingly gazing at the downtrodden and slumped form of Carol, who is left abandoned and weeping among a mismatched crew of monsters who hate his guts.  (I tremble to think of what happened to Carol, who really is one of the most pitiable movie muppets in the history of cinema.  Someone please give him a cookie.  And some Prozac.)

What bothers me is that Max’s departure is not a willful decision.  This is not Max exerting his independence and understanding that yes, it is time to return to reality and deal with life outside the wolf suit.  This is surrender.  It’s the sad realization that even in an environment that he imagined himself, he cannot make things right.  Or better.  Or well-scripted.  I don’t need everything to end in buttercups and sunshine, but complete and utter demoralization?  Unnecessary.

Before anyone accuses me of slacker movie-viewing, I would like to say that yes, I get it.  The dysfunction of the wild things mimics the dysfunction in Max’s life!  Aha!  But if that’s the case, then how am I supposed to interpret Max’s time on the island?  While he indeed returns home at the end of the movie to a cozy meal of warm soup, rich cake, and cold milk, a nice throw-back to the final page of the picture book, I don’t understand why his time mediating ridiculous monster-vendettas made him any more comfortable with returning to a broken home and a bully sister.  Having Max tip back the hood of his wolf suit and smile shyly at his sleeping mother doesn’t cut it.  I want answers.

I also understand that psychoanalytic critics could have a good time picking apart this movie.  Admittedly, I’m not a huge fan of psychoanalytic literary analysis, and children’s literature is often subject to what I think are ridiculous claims that use the word “psyche” and “phallus” and “subconscious” far too frequently.  I suppose, however, that a psychoanalytic lens might explain that uncomfortable scene where the maternal (or sororal?  I couldn’t tell) wild thing named KW devours Max, hiding him from the bloodthirsty Carol, only to pull him out of her innards a few minutes later, slippery with saliva, in a weird childbirth-esque scene.  (So Max is reborn… into the same position of helplessness and despair).  Psychoanalysis might also explain some of the completely illegible elements of the movie.  Why, I ask, does this same KW befriend two owls named Bob and Terry?  And why does she get their attention by throwing rocks at them and watching them plummet to the beach?  Eh?  What’s going on here?

So, yeah, I hated it.  NO JOY.  There should be some joy in Where the Wild Things Are, right?  I will concede only a few pros.  The beginning sequence, in which a crazy Max chases his dog through his house, was great. And the frame of Max’s home life was good.  When a gang of mean teenagers destroy Max’s snow fort, I almost lost it.  Good job, boy-who-plays-Max.  And visually the move was really cool.  The monsters were duly impressive, and the miniature world that Carol builds — a model of mountains and rivers and mini wild things that could have been the centerpiece of a better movie — was perfect.

But yeah.  Mostly suck.  Thanks for scarring my childhood self, Jonze and Eggers.

______________________________________________________________

* I don’t speak for Sendak.  From what I’ve read, he is supportive of this interpretation of his book.

 

I’m back in Houston after a week and a half in North Carolina, where it was a wonderful and bracing 32 degrees my last morning there.  Oh sweet, sweet chilliness.  But I’m enjoying beautiful weather here (for the moment) in the Bayou City, so I have no cause for complaint.  And I had a wonderful time with my high school girls at the reunion, with Lilian in Asheville, with the fam in numerous restaurants throughout the Queen City (woohoo Deejai mussaman curry and chocolate creme brulee at Savor!), with my brother and his family at one of his productions, and with Sandy throughout the streets of the city as I got lost.  More than once.

It’s true that I lived in Charlotte for six years, but that does not change the fact that I am directionally challenged.

I’ll post pictures on facebook sometime later in the week, when Danny returns to Texas bearing my camera. Until then, I am too lazy to narrate something meaningful or creative, and therefore I will recount in lazy, list form some highlights of the Great Charlotte Trip of 09:

1. Mmmm.  Savor.  Delicious delicious food, and cheap, with daily specials.  Barbecue chicken.  Tomato and cucumber salad.  Sirloin burger with applewood bacon and carmelized onions.  Peanut butter pie.  If you’re in Charlotte, you should check it out for lunch.  Morehead, near the stadium.
2. Singing some high school classics with Beth, Erin, Noel, and Brian on the way to the reunion.
3. Searching, with Danny’s help, for a postcard appropriate to send along with a job application, so the school can acknowledge receipt of my materials, as I forgot to purchase a Rice postcard before I left town.  I considered a “Roadkill Cafe” recipe card, an artsy photograph of Willie Nelson, and a provocative group photo of football cheerleaders before finding an innocuous reproduction of a Degas painting.
4. Meeting Sterling, my new niece, the baby of many expressions.  And watching Danny make ridiculous faces at her.  I have photographic documentation.
5. Sitting on an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway with Lil, during which we discussed the many inflections of the word “biscuit” for referring to different individuals’ degree of hotness and the probability of serious injury if one were to tumble down the incline a few inches from our feet.
6. Dad’s roast, mashed potatoes, and peas, the makings of the Perfect Bite.  Leftovers would have been wonderful, but Lucky, the Largest Dog Ever (see Figure A), ate the remaining hunk of beef in a furtive grab-and-gobble.  That was a lot of meat!
   

   Figure A

7. Watching my nephew Andrew careen around a high school gym wearing a cape and Burger King crown.
8. My flight back, during which I endured the constant screaming of the two demon children seated in front of me.  They slapped and bit one another and shook their seats for the entire two hours and fifteen minutes, except for during the two minutes when their mother coerced the flight crew to sing “Happy Birthday” to one of her spawn, in celebration of his spawn-dom.

Okay, that last one isn’t so much a highlight as a scar on my brain, which was already tender from dissertation writing.  For now I’m back to the job market grind with new enthusiasm and gusto.  I’ve put together an unobtrusive playlist to inspire Deep Thoughts and Unwarranted Confidence.  I tried to just put my iTunes library on shuffle, but it insisted on returning to “A Dramatic Reading of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, read by Martin Maglaras.”

Although I do like to chant “By the shores of Gitche Gumee.”