Gentlemen and Players

I'm almost done reading Gentlemen and Players, by Joanne Harris and I didn't realize that she was the author of Chocolat. G and P is a delicious revenge story, but so far I have no notion of what the specific act is that is being avenged. I do know that a lifetime of horrible injustice and misunderstanding is the subject of vendetta (cosmic justice) and for this, two characters are intertwined and become narrators, victims and perpetrators, all at once. The climax is yet to come. I can't wait.

I have also begun Jen Lancaster's Bitter is the New Black and I find myself strangely sympathetic to Jen, who is nothing like me, except in her compulsive aggressive perfectionism, judgmentalism, narcissism, antisocialism and neologism.

I've been trying to read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, highly recommended by CG, whose recommends are always firstrate and challenging. This one is too, especially since it's about the lives of children and don't let it fool you and make you think it's about bioethics or apocalyptic endtimes or somesuch. It takes your lungs and squeezes them hard and you forget to breathe while you are reading just like you did when you read Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale. "How were we to know we were happy?"

A Year of Nice May be Called For

This has been coming for a long time. It's time to be a nice person, or at least practice being one. It's not so much that I don't think I'm nice enough, but I think I could be nicer on a more consistent basis. The scary persona isn't working for me. I mean it is, but it's scaring me even. For example, I ordered my books from the campus bookstore on May 3 for a summer session course that begins on May 17. I have the written confirmation to prove it. Last Friday, I sent all my students an e-mail to say hi and welcome to the class and go buy the book and so on. So, on Monday, one of my future new students writes to me saying that the bookstore HAS NO BOOK ORDER ON FILE FOR MY COURSE!!!! Now I know this can't be right, so I give them a call and sure enough, they DON"T HAVE ANY RECORD OF A BOOK ORDER!!!! This would not be the first time this has happened, so when the bookstore personnelperson shifts into "I'll go check on this and give you a call" mode, I reply in my best ape-in-a-cage-on-extra-adrenaline mode: "YOU WILL NOT CALL ME BACK. YOU WILL NOT CHECK ON THIS. YOU WILL GET ME THE MOST UBIQUITOUS LOGIC BOOK IN AMERICA RIGHT NOW. YOU WILL HAVE SUFFICIENT COPIES FOR ALL MY STUDENTS BY THE FIRST DAY OF CLASSES THIS THURSDAY !!!!! And I hung up the phone. Then I called the regional sales rep and told her what happened and she gave me a lot of sympathy and five differient solutions just in case the bookstore didn't come through. By 4 pm, everyone connected with the bookstore had left me 90 second long voicemail messages assuring me that the problem had been taken care of and then the adrenalized ape need not tear their hearts out this time.

So that Sicilian thing I do really really works. But now I have an anger hangover. Which means I think I scared myself more than anyone. If I could do stuff like this and then feel terrific later and even better the next day, I would know that I am the sociopath I was raised to be. But I'm not, so what should I do about it? Be nice? Maybe.