This Week

Kindergarten, grade school, junior high, high school. Beneath desks, between tables, curled up on the bus. Center front in school portraits, center forward in soccer, fastest sprinter in the game but too often mowed down.

This week, though I'm much more substantial, I find that I speak too quietly, and too infrequently. Just this week, I lost four pounds.

Boss

She didn't liked to be bossed, and that was why she was extra-careful not to boss. Which sometimes led to trouble because though she would never say what she wanted, she would try to get it nevertheless through a kind of sign language, through telepathy. And when she did not get it, she grew to be perfectly contented with what she was getting, which, without having been properly articulated, was much less than what she would have wanted, ideally, at least from the perspective of someone practiced at bossing. So she lived on an entirely different plane than those she thought of as "bosses" -- that is, everyone else in the world -- and while she was satisfied within the confines of that plane, she knew, just as they knew, that her world was not their world, but something lesser. Yet not having a means to compare and contrast, she felt she had reached a kind of apex by simply not bossing others. So when someone came along and asked her to be the boss of herself, when he told her that this shift was necessary in order for him to live with her, she couldn't decide whether he was doing her a great big favor, or whether he was just bossing her around.

The Slap, by Christopher Tsiolkas

Chirstopher Tsiolkas'sThe Slap just gets better and better until the final pages, which are fantastic! So often I quit reading novels when I get to the ending, because so many books with promising openings lose their momentum about halfway through.

The Slap is worth reading for its simple premise (a man slaps a kid who is not his own at a suburban picnic), and it's structure - it's told from the povs of 8 characters, in 8 sections, and each character's life reverberates with the lingering sting of the slap as marriages, friendships, and partnerships are tested and reevaluated. Each character in The Slap manages to be grippingly interesting, perhaps because each has something they've been hiding, and each must decide what to do with that secret. And there are so many sparkling sentences!

The book takes place in Melbourne, Australia, which resembles Zadie Smith's London in that people of many cultural backgrounds and types now coexist, almost comfortably (but not quite), and as a result, existence is dynamic. Which resembles our world, really.

The most interesting theme in this book is that profound change and growth happen when one has the opportunity to go in a brand-new direction and then, after carefully weighing the options, chooses instead to stick with the life that they already have, a life that, for all its seeming predictability and mundanity and flaws, is nevertheless remarkable.

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Insomnia

again - and I suppose I COULD work on my play, but instead, here I am. I guess I'd rather feel as though I'm addressing someone who's kind of like me. I mean, even though I go to many, many plays, I don't think of the playgoing audience as mine - not necessarily. My audience might just as soon see a movie or go bowling or plant some tomatoes.