Books read in April:
- Detransition Baby was electric and sharp and cinematic. Loved it.
- Crying in H-Mart was the absolute wrecking ball I had heard it would be. Brought up a LOT of memories of my mother’s cancer. Big ugly sobs, some primal screams in the shower while John was out. Zauner’s prose regarding the illness is so raw and true, but it was her description of being Hapa, being in between that made me say “fuck.” outloud. “But you’re not even Korean.” Fuck.
- Tuck Everlasting and Island were obvs both re-reads. Babbitt really crafts such a sharp story, and the writing is so evocative and imaginative for such a young reader. I listened to Islands on the way back from Puerto Vallarta, and it was such a treat, but unexpectedly arresting when we got to the death of Rontu: the reader got emotional, and though a total pro, you could tell she was reading through tears and stifling a sob throughout the event. I wept wept wept, completely out of nowhere.
- Re-read Living with a Wild God, an interesting one to revisit from time to time.
- Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch felt like a chore, to me, but I think, weirdly, it was a CPTSD reaction. It was very funny, and very well crafted, but man… my whole body reacts to stories of like… religious persecution and policing. I wanted to fling the book away from me at parts. This is a sensation that has crept up on me during Handmaids Tale and Game of Thrones (of all places.) Never not catching me off guard.
A weekend in Peurto Vallarta with Laura for John’s birthday.
8 days into my new job and the entire project (scheduling) I was hired to work on has been cancelled. They’re moving me onto another team, on a product that I know nothing about (campaigns). Part of coming over to this co was founded on the supposition that I was going to 1) be working on a new product, and 2) part of largely new team at the company. It’s not make-or-break, but that set up assuaged a large part of my anxiety as I felt like I would have ample leeway during onboarding, get to fail and fumble along with the rest of the team and keep impostor syndrome at bay.
Now I find myself on a very established team, on a very visible, well established product where I’m the only newbie. It comes with a lot of opportunity, but obviously a lot of risk and a ton of room for anxiety.
Everything about this new job sounds like I am an employee in a Chuck Palahniuk novel. I am campaign’s new staff designer. I am campaign’s advocate for an improved customer experience.
Books I read in March. Weirdly plowed through a bunch of nature/natural history books, all of them weirdly referencing each other in surprising ways. Rachel Carson name dropped in the Svensson & Meiburgs book, the Sargasso sea popping up in Carson and Meiburg’s while being the star of Svensson’s. All of them pointing me to W.H. Hudson which I will address this month. Was he gay? No, of course not says history, he married a much older woman, his land lady, and they were estranged for a majority of their marriage, and remained on good terms as pen pals, which is of course, very normal for heteros to do. In so many of the excerpts from his journals and books in Meiburg’s book an urgent, quite blip on the gaydar goes off. I know these sentiments, this alienation, this resignation. I ask Levi, who recommended The Book of Eels and is also reading Meiburg: “oh, same vibe for sure.” Who knows!
Several People are Typing was the surprise darling this month — I think I discovered it on a booklist for fans of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. A very fun, very wild, but very thoughtful manic meditation on existence, the body, and modern life. I found myself getting surprisingly choked up towards the end: somewhere between the actual sentiments being conveyed and the marvel of a book like this getting made, the achievement; something got to me. Loved it.
I start my new job on the first Monday of April, in seven days. I’m excited and also just… so tired. How long will these skills be viable, valuable? How can I possibly keep this up for another 25 years? I move today from the vaguely exciting, punchy colored world of fan-wiki creation and media consumption to the far more manila-folder world of small business brick-n-mortar management software.
At the beginning of a new job I am struck by the once familiar feeling of starting a new year at school. For me that meant imagining how I would reinvent myself for that year. Obviously I couldn’t shed any of the reputation, nerdishness or general faggotry; this reinvention was chiefly concerned with handwriting. “How will I make my ‘j’s this year? What new ampersand could I employ?” You know, normal 5th grade thoughts.
I find myself entertaining the same fantasy planning now. Maybe this is the job where I never let my email inbox get out of control. Maybe this is the job where my computer is never disorganized. Maybe this is the job where I use some byzantine task software and “get shit done.” I’ll probably just adopt some sort of on-camera uniform and call it a day. “Jory always wears a black shirt.”
Two job offers, both alike in dignity.
Stepping out of the house lately, the air is laced with the scent of citrus blossoms, gentle but everywhere. Behind the house the tangerines, the kishu mandarins, the lemons and the grapefruits are in full blossom, while still heavy with fruit. This is now being the second year I’ve experienced this, here, at home, so I experience an epiphany as well. For so long, annual discoveries like this — the colossal eruption of the jacarandas off Prospect Ave in Los Feliz, the bottle brush tree on Henry Street in the Duboce Triangle painting the whole street red with its cast-offs — were scavenged: welcome discoveries that I was lucky to stumble across, but ultimately fleeting and borrowed. I was only ever visiting, a penny found on the street in a city I was only passing-through.
But these are our citrus trees, on our property - for as long as we are here, we will have this little annual ritual, the ceremony of it, the delight.
Books I read in February. I would love to see a tv show that features Porochista Khakpour and Jeremy Atheron Lin as hosts— they both bring this sharp, but eeyore-esque Gen-x narration to the Los Angeles (and the wider world) of yesteryear. They could just drive around LA and point at buildings and venues and say “that used to be good… but even when it was, it was actually really fucked up. I guess it’s a Sweetgreen now.” Or something. I’d legit watch.
The Rules of Magic was dreadful. Contained the phrase “this is an unexpected surprise.”
Found Tolentino’s and Baldwin’s books sparkling, crisp, razor sharp and horrifying.
In Trick Mirror, Tolentino references From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, so of course I had to re-read. Still holds up, missed the through-line of grammar policing — “…hide out in? run away to!? Jamie who talks like this!” — when I read it as a kid. The audio version I listened to had a very sweet afterward from E.L. Konigsburg that made me tear up a little.