I Have Reading OCD

   

 I am one of those lucky people who love to read.  I don’t mean just old magazines while I'm waiting in the doctor’s office, or the celebrity rags at the hair salon. (Though I LOVE those.)

     I genuinely love to read. Always have. I admit I was the pretentious kid who was reading Shakespeare in grade school, and thinking I understood it. I've always loved Salinger – except for “Catcher in the Rye.” Ptooey. Yuck.  How obnoxious and awful is Holden Caufield? I went to school with people just like him; I didn’t need to read his self-indulgent… oops, I digress.

     Anyway, you’d think that as much as I like to hide from the real world, I’d read a lot of fiction. You’d be wrong.  The thing is, while just about anyone can come up with an interesting idea that isn't enough.  Good fiction is really, really hard to write. Bad fiction, not so much.

     Nothing annoys me more than starting a book with a good premise and intriguing characters only to have it all fall apart halfway through. When that happens I’m pissed with the characters and furious with the writer for wasting my time.

     At this point a normal person would close the book and walk away. Not me. I have a weird tick where I absolutely cannot leave a book unfinished.

     Apparently I have reading OCD.  You know how people with regular OCD have to wash their hands a certain number of times, or check the lock on the door twice before leaving or they drive themselves crazy? That’s me with an unfinished book. I can’t ignore the unread pages.

     It’s like being in a bad relationship. I keep going back to the terrible book, knowing all the while that I’m going to be disappointed. I convince myself time and time again that it will get better. It never does.

     The latest example is the IT book of this season, ­City on Fire.  The story is very Bonfire of the Vanities,  (without the humor or  pizzaz), as it follows a group of characters through a moment in 80s era New York.

     Written by wonderkind Garth Risk Hallberg, it’s a first novel that netted the author something north of $2 million after a vigorous bidding war. With all that money invested, you’d think someone would have hired an editor to oversee the project. Again you’d be wrong. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the tome never went under a red pen.

    The City on Fire literally weighs in at Godzilla-like 700-plus pages. (I don’t know exactly; I bought it on by Kindle. The idea of schelpping a book that size around gave me pause.) But it’s not the length that forces me to put it away every night after just a few brief chapters. It’s the writing. It’s labored.

     When I was in school, I was always taught to aim for the brevity of Ernest Hemmingway. Mr. Hallberg must have missed that class. Where good ole’ Ernest was known be so tight with words that some chapters run barely a single page; Hallberg has never met a long flowery sentence he didn’t love. His descriptions run into tangents and he love, love, loves his SAT words.

     I love a good wordsmith, but constantly using terms that force me to constantly flip back and forth to a dictionary is lame and irritating. It not only takes me out of the story (which in this case is tangential enough without interruptions) but it’s condescending. We get it; you’re smart and know a lot of big words. Yay you.

     You get the point: I kind of hate this book. And yet, every night I chip away at it. I’m a fast reader, but I expect to be punishing myself with City on Fire for at least another month. Ugh.

     I love non-fiction. I ‘m convinced that just like a bad merlot is better than a bad cabernet, bad non-fiction better than bad fiction. It’s hard for even the worst writer to make fascinating people dull.  Even though god knows they try.

     Recently I’ve hit a vein of terrific non-fiction, some of which has even popular.  I’ll read anything from Bill Bryson (some is better than others), Jon Krakauer (don’t hold the film “Everest” against him) and Erik Larson (I never thought about the Lusitania or the world’s fair before his books). Those are just some of the great ones.

    I’ve also read terribly written, but really interesting books about flappers, stand-up comedy, Alan Turing, First Ladies, the Roosevelts, hummingbirds and rock and roll managers.  You get the drift.

Some of them were painfully bad.  All could have been made better with good editing. But they were still worth reading.  And yes, I finished them all.

     Currently I have a backlog of books waiting to be read, including some fiction.  I’m sure that by the time I finish slogging through City on Fire the list will be even longer.  According to my Kindle, I’m only 310 pages deep of 903. Which means I should be done sometime after the first of the year. 

Happy Holidays Y'all!

    Lately I’ve been feeling like an outsider in my own country. Since I'm white, female and Jewish that may seem ridiculous.

   I’m second generation on one side; third on the other. When people ask me what I am, I tend to stand there for a second with a blank expression and say, “Um, American?” before I realize they want to know where my grandparents and great-grandparents emigrated from.

   That would have been Russia. Because they were Jews, and not generally loved there they fled to a safer place: America. It wasn’t easy (my Papa Ike arrived speaking barely any English with little money and fewer contacts) they survived and most became valuable, if not valued members of society. (They were still Jewish after all.)

   By the time I came along, the Livetens had settled in a liberal university town in New England.  I went to a school bursting with diversity. My best friends in grade school were a rainbow of races and religions.

   I guess I grew up naïve. Not only did I think everyone had great museums, art galleries and theater in their towns, but I had little exposure to racism and religious bigotry.  It was great.

   Until the first time I someone called me a kike.  At first I didn’t even know what it meant.  I’d been called a lot of names - fatso, shorty, four-eyes. You know, the usuals, but I’d never been attacked for my beliefs. Especially since I didn’t really know what I believed, being more a cultural Jew than a practicing one.

   Because it didn’t happen to me often, I could shove it to the back of my mind and move on. But it still occupies real estate there.

   Which is just one of the multitude of reasons I’m so appalled by the current GOP landscape. 

   Granted, neither Ben “Loosewiththefacts” Carson or Donald “Imnotaracist” Trump have used the slang words for the people they hate. They’ve done worse: they encouraged their followers to do so.. And more.

   Pro-immigrant activists and Hispanics have been attacked at Trump rallies. The Donald’s response is that his fans are “enthusiastic.”  He says it with a grin. He makes me shudder with fear.

   I don’t think I’m being overdramatic, and I don’t really care if I am, but that’s what people thought about those nasty Hitler followers. They were just passionate believers. Wearing ugly brown outfits.

   Currently there are a handful of GOP candidates and millions of registered voters who fervently believe that only straight male Christians should be President. It is one reason why Obama-haters passionately insist that he is Muslim.  It would be damaging politically to admit that they hate him because he’s black (or as Rupert Murdock insinuates, a “bad” black man as opposed to Carson’s “good black man”), but it’s okay to hate him for his religion.

   Silly me. I thought the good ole USA was founded on religious freedom. It’s in the Constitution. You know, that document that the right wing likes to quote, but has apparently never read.

   This week, just in time for the latest GOP ‘debate’ the crazies have trotted out their annual “war against Christmas” campaign. It appears every year about the same time that retailers drag out their holiday decorations. And like the decorations, it comes out earlier and earlier.

   I’ve been hearing clerks and friends wish me a Merry Christmas since I was old enough to understand. I always assumed that it was a friendly greeting, a seasonal version of  “have a nice day.” 

   When some people switched to “happy holidays” I didn’t give it much thought. It’s more inclusive and more, dare I say it, Christian of them, to acknowledge other people’s celebrations. It was nice.

   Apparently I was wrong. It was the sign of the coming apocalypse.

   The latest kerfuffle is about Starbucks cups. Apparently the red and green colors aren’t Christmas-y enough. The old ones had snowflakes and skates on them, which I didn’t realize were traditional Christian symbols. I’ve been in a lot of churches over the years and spotted nary a skate or a snowflake. Maybe they hide them in the back.

  I realize that the cup issue is really just a cover for something far more nasty and insidious.

   Maybe I’m still naïve. I honestly believe that my Jewish grand-nieces and nephews, and my Muslim and Buddist friend’s kids and grandchildren have a right to be leaders in this country. Just as my LGBT friends do.

   What this cup hysteria has done is make me realize that while pockets of the country have grown more and more open and accepting there’s a huge swath of people who are angry at their own failures and problems. Those people are just looking for a place to plunk the blame.

   Those haters zone directly onto folks they see as others: people with different religions and customs and sexuality.  Those haters complain that they are just being true patriots, and are defending their country from people who would destroy it.

   But isn’t the greatest thing about America that it welcomes others? Isn’t that what the whole wonderful ‘melting pot’ is supposed to be about?

  I thought it was. I hope it is. I believe it is.

   As for my celebrations this season? I’m looking for a giant inflatable rubber duck that lights up at night.

  Happy holidays y’all!

Just Call Me the Grim Reaper

Every once and a while you read about some Mensa reject who managed to blow up his house by igniting too many flea foggers. I used to laugh at them. Not any more.

Now I understand. Those poor folks have been driven mad by the neverending onslaught of pests that they will literally do anything to rid their place of the plague, even if it means they may destroy their homes.

I envision the homeowner being interviewed on TV. They’re covered with soot but  gleefully proclaiming, “Yeah, the house is gone, but so are the fleas!  Winner!”

Currently I do not have a bug problem. (That sound you hear is me knocking wood, lighting a candle and doing a preventative interpretive dance.)  Actually my problem is worse. I have mice. 

Over the years I’ve grown accustomed to the occasional rodent.  My barn is within spitting distance of the house, and where there is hay and grain, there are mice.  It was never a big problem before. Usually Poppy the Brittany dispatched them quickly, and that was the end of that.

Not this year. I’m not sure if it’s the four-year drought or something else, but word seems to have spread among the mouse population that there’s good eating at the Liveten household. 

It began when I noticed Poppy staring raptly at the kitchen broiler. She sat for hours, watching intently, still as the proverbial mouse.  The next day I noticed that the cover that is supposed to protect the leather couch from dogs was rolled up. When I straightened it, a mouse fell out. It was quite dead.

I was understandable startled and a little grossed out, but I praised Poppy, picked up the mouse with a plastic bag and dumped it in the trash outside. I figured I was done.  I was so naïve.

Poppy was not. That day she was hanging out by the canary flight cage, refusing to budge. After assuring her that there was no mouse, I proudly moved the cage to show her. A mouse tore out. Unfortunately Poppy misjudged her prey and was stalking the rear of the cage while the mouse sprinted to the closet from the front.

Obviously, Poppy needed reinforcements. My cat was useless. Not only is she confined to her own room for her safety, she gave up mousing the day she moved into Chez Liveten.

Killing anything is an anathema to me. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than twenty years. I once hit a pigeon with my car and it still haunts me. But this was getting ridiculous. I kept thinking I saw mice everywhere. Maybe I was.

In general I like rodents. I had hamsters and gerbils as a kid, and I think mice are adorable. Where they belong. In their natural habitat. Which is outside.

At the store I by-passed the disgusting snap traps and the inhumane glue boards. Instead I shelled out $29 for a wee little wire have-a-heart trap. They don’t kill the animal, so you can release back to the wild.

That night I baited the trap with peanut butter (mice, apparently are fools for the stuff) and set it up in back of the bird cage and happily went to bed.  After mere moments I heard a snap.

I leaped up  and smugly ran to the kitchen. In the cage was a teeny, furious brown mouse with a glossy coat.  I may have even whistled a little as I brought it behind the barn and gently tipped the creature onto a pile of leaves.

Just to be on safe side, I set the trap up again. I caught three mice that night.  It may have even been the same mouse. They all look alike, so I can’t say for sure.

What I do know is that the by the time morning came I was a new person.  A blood thirsty one.  Cute little noses and tiny pink feet no longer had the power to move me. I wanted them dead. All of them. And their families too.

I went back to the store for weapons. I still wouldn’t buy glue traps and poison is out,  since poisoned mice go outside and can be eaten by birds or my dogs.  But I bought so many snap traps that the woman behind the register

eyed me suspiciously as if she thought I was going to sneak them in Halloween candy.  As if I’d waste precious mouse traps on children!

As soon as I got home I set them up. One in the kitchen, one in the closet and one behind the birdcage. I went to bed warmed by the thought that the mice were going to be gone from my life. I even dreamed about the little suckers.

In the morning I checked the traps carefully. The mice had somehow licked the peanut butter off and escaped the traps. I was enraged. I swear I heard the damn things laughing at me.  Apparently I was now feeding them.

Cursing loudly, I reset the traps, carefully smearing the peanut butter all over the bait surface.  This. Was. War!

That afternoon Poppy snagged another one.  Eventually I caught one in a trap. And then another. Right now about half the time I catch them, and the rest of the time they lick the trap clean. But the body count is growing.

I’m not exactly winning the war, but between Poppy and I, we’re holding our own. But honestly, if I thought a flea fogger would kill mice, I’d buy so many you’d see me on the evening news.