Monday Miscellany: What a delicious, nostalgic exorcism

Notes from the week of July 15 - 21

Jul 22, 2024

This morning I worked an opening shift at the coffee shop, so I’m wrapping up today’s edition of the newsletter to send a little later than usual. Good evening! My body’s a little tired and my mental energy has been spent on customer interactions, but luckily I thought ahead and wrote most of this yesterday. Let’s go!

Currently reading

True Biz by Sara Nović is a book I’ve had on my to-read list for ages, ever since it was a book club pick on The Stacks back in 2022. It got a lot of buzz when it came out, everyone I knew who read it said it was really interesting and great, I even placed a hold on it through Libby, which came in and lapsed several different times, and still, it took me this long. But thank goodness I finally made the time for it, because it is indeed excellent!

The setting is River Valley School for the Deaf, and the situation is that several students have gone missing, leaving headmistress February scrambling to figure out what happened and where they’ve disappeared to. We quickly flash back to months prior, when the school year is just beginning and Charlie, one of the missing students, has just transferred to RVSD from a nearby mainstream high school. The narrative alternates between Charlie, February, and a few additional students, teachers, parents, and significant others as the timeline catches up with itself and we slowly figure out why Charlie and her friends ran.

I loved this story for many reasons. The campus vibes are exquisite, and Nović is so good at writing believable teenagers in all their emotional, rage-filled glory. There’s a simultaneous adult storyline from February’s perspective, about her upbringing as a hearing CODA (child of deaf adults) and her relationships with her wife, Mel, and her deaf, aging mother, who has dementia. But above all, it was the immersion in Deaf culture for me—the way signed conversations were formatted in the text, the inserted bits of February’s lesson plans about Deaf culture and history, the illustrations of ASL signs, the debates about cochlear implants, Charlie’s conversations with her roommate about BASL and how the Deaf community is not immune to racism, the ideas about accessibility and how the world is geared toward hearing people, the importance of schools specifically for deaf people and their struggles with budget cuts and closures, the horrors of language deprivation and the overwhelming joys of successful communication. True Biz pulled me in right away, and I didn’t want to put it down. It’s truly unlike anything I’ve read before. I can’t wait to see what Sara Nović writes next.

I’m now in the middle of The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, which is about a trio of friends, Tony, Roz, and Charis, whose friend Zenia has died… but maybe is not actually dead? And she, or her memory, or her continued spiritual presence in their lives, still has a weird power over all of them, and it’s all very mysterious and it feels like it’s building toward something. But I’ll be honest, at almost 200 pages in (of 520!), I’m starting to get impatient. What is up with this Zenia person, Margaret? Could we be quite quick with it?? Part of me is tempted to put the book down and move on to something else, but another part is falling victim to the sunken cost fallacy and really does want to know what happens. So we’ll see. Stay tuned.

A legally-required heads-up: if you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. ♥︎

Currently listening

Look, I’m sorry, but all I wanted to listen to this week was Blink-182’s California (2016). Pop punk in this vein is such a comfort food for my ears, and this has long been a favorite album to blast when I’m in that mood.

There’s something so soothing about how Blink-182 records seem to follow a pattern, or at least have a few types of songs that always show up, even across different iterations of the band.¹ You know, like the Down-Tempo Sad Song, which in this case is “Home is Such a Lonely Place.”² Or the Joke Song That’s Less Than a Minute Long and Often Quite Vulgar, of which there are two on California: “Built This Pool” and “Brohemian Rhapsody.”³ My two favorites from this album, though, are “Left Alone” (which in my brain is equivalent to “Give Me One Good Reason” on Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, but don’t ask me to explain why) and “Bored to Death.”

I love the rhythm of the verse in “Left Alone,” and the way it builds, and the shouty vocal harmonies of the chorus, and the lyric “are we halfway gone, or halfway there?” There’s a moment (at 2:15 if we’re being precise, which obviously we are), where the guitar and bass drop out and it’s just voices and drums for a few seconds, and the four drumbeats that bring everybody back in are SO satisfying. PAH PAH PAH PAH.

“Bored to Death” also has some tasty harmony, especially the background ahhhhs in the chorus, and the so-stupid-it-might-be-profound line “life is too short to last long.” Oh, and the build-up to the bridge! And the way the lyric “I said I’m sorry, I’m a bit of a letdown” just hits, every time. I was indeed thirty whole years old when this album came out, but man—what a delicious, nostalgic exorcism of my teenage feelings.

And in happy news for me, I just this moment learned that there’s a deluxe version of California, discovered when I was searching for album art for this very newsletter, that contains a live acoustic version of “Bored to Death!” Ugh, we LOVE a stripped-down, more emotionally vulnerable interpretation of a favorite. Here it is if you fancy a listen:

¹ If you’ve gone down the same Wikipedia rabbit holes as I have, you might know that this particular album was made after Tom DeLonge left the lineup, while Matt Skiba from Alkaline Trio was taking his place.

² On Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, it’s “Stay Together for the Kids” and on Enema of the State, it’s “Adam’s Song.”

³ On Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, it’s “Happy Holidays, You Bastard.” I have fond, panicky memories of driving around with my mom in the car in high school, and absolutely lunging for the skip button on the stereo when this one came on.

And another thing

Here are The Millions’ most anticipated summer 2024 releases, in case you need more books for your to-read list. A few that jumped out to me were Frighten the Horses by Oliver Radclyffe (memoir), The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (fiction), The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş (fiction), and Survival is a Promise by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (nonfiction).
This limonada recipe looks stupid good.
I got a new camera (my first Fujifilm if we’re not counting Instax) and you know the first photos I made were of the kittens. Please enjoy some Phoebe toe beans and a big yawn:

Haiku round-up

A new camera brings a renewed interest in photo walks around the neighborhood, and with my eyes trained on my surroundings, looking for interesting scenes and details, my mind is free to wander. I’ve been thinking about a few people I love who are hurting or going through challenging times, and it’s been difficult settling into the knowledge that I can’t fix things. I want to be able to fix things. Instead I’m reminding myself that life is change, that no feeling or situation is permanent, and that what I can do is be a steady presence while we wait together for all the good that’s coming.