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Curtis Sittenfeld, unlike any author I’ve ever read with any ferocity before, has an uncanny ability to write characters that, despite the fact that you might not like them, you almost always empathize with them. That was the case with Prep (one of my favourites from last year) and it’s certainly true of her latest, The Man of My Dreams.

Hannah Gavener is fourteen years old when the novel opens, completely awkward, obsessed with celebrity, and unbearably adolescent. By the time the novel ends, Hannah’s childhood is far behind her, but the pain of growing up, her parents’ divorce and the unrequited love for Henry, her cousin’s boyfriend, seem to define her for all eternity. Hannah doesn’t want it this way; it’s just what happens, despite Sittenfeld trying to tell us differently.

I found the novel extremely satisfying—and was quite interested in how Sittenfeld structured certain parts of it, juxtaposing past and present in intriguing ways, foretelling the story in certain parts, backtelling in others. It all molds together very well, and I’m even more impressed that she’s managed to write two solid books within such a short time of one another.

And just like I did with Prep, I read this book in one sitting—like a girl with ice cream in the house whose supposed to be on a diet, I crammed it in, sweet burning my brain, because I love her use of language, her painfully real situations (just wait until you get to the camping scene and you’ll know exactly what you mean), and remembered how awful it was being a teenager, always being left behind, always being the “friend”, never being the one the boys danced with, argh, it’s so real, but that’s a good thing. I think.

For more reading, EW has a good, short interview with the author.

Whew.

The super-fancy disease doctor’s office has just called, the results of my MRI? My left hip isn’t showing any signs of avascular necrosis; it’s perfectly normal. How’s that for a good news day!

What that means is all the pain in my joints is coming from the disease (which will be cleared up by the new meds) and not from any other complications. Now that is something I can live with. I just celebrated by doing high kicks all around our gPod (as we have named our workspace in honour of Douglas Coupland’s new, hilarious novel).

(And I know I’m not supposed to blog at work but this was just too good not to share).

Yesterday was pretty much a write off for me, my RRHB was working so I spent much of the day in my pajamas watching the movies I had taped on the Faux-Vo. The first film I watched, Heights, was a quasi-Crash-like movie about how the lives of six or seven New Yorkers intertwined. At the centre of the story is Diana Lee, an overly dramatic, highly paid stage actress played by Glenn Close, um, very little stretch there. Her daughter, Isabel (Elizabeth Banks, the poor man’s Rachel McAdams), an aspiring photographer, is about to get married to Jonathan (James Marsden). There’s some non-interesting backstory with the fiance and a really predictable emotional “twist” toward the end. All in all, fairly typical fare for TMN.

And like Crash it sort of suffers from the ‘way too much coincidences going on’ syndrome. You know, movies about actors and actresses also tend to suffer from navel gazing self-indulgence, so much so that I tend not to care after a while. Oh, poor you Glenn Close/Diana Lee, with your fabulous apartment in NYC and your fabulous life on stage, your husband’s cheating on you and you have low self-esteem. Yawn.

Then I watched Melinda and Melinda. I wanted to see it for three reasons: a) it’s Woody Allen, b) the premise of two separate stories starting the same character sounded interesting and c) it costars Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is one of my favs after seeing Inside Man, and forever-in-my-heart Jonny Lee Miller, whose portrayal of Byron remains burned in my mind as one of the great, but little seen biopic performances of the last few years. Both actors played in separate episodes of BBC’s retelling of The Canterbury Tales too, which I quite enjoyed.

Annnywaaay. Melinda and Melinda. Suffice to say I found the dialogue stilted and aged, kind of like old cheddar, but it didn’t fit the environment or the characters. The premise of the film, four friends sitting around enjoying dinner and then telling Melinda’s story, each from a different perspective, one tragic, the other comic, was okay, but it didn’t sell the movie to me. A lot of the same problems I found with Match Point, exist in this film as well.

And considering that I fell asleep during the crucial emotional conflict during Dramatic Melinda’s storyline, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the film. My advice is that if you’re going to see a Woody Allen film from the past couple years, skip this one and go straight to Match Point. Even though it’s not perfect, it’s a damn sight better than Melinda and Melinda.

And now we’re here on Sunday. Back after a day of visiting various different mothers. My RRHB is watching boxing. I’m blogging. And I’m about to start the laundry. Thank goodness I found some energy today. Real life is kind of nice when you think about it.

The joy of the Faux-Vo coupled with easy access to TMN means that I tape a lot of movies that a) I never watch and then erase or b) that I try to watch and never make it all the way through. But with this damn cold that I’ve contracted, after work yesterday, I lay on the couch and watched Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rainmaker. It’s a fairly average film, and it feels very dated even though it was only made 10 years ago.

Made during that spate of time where every John Grisham novel seemed to be adapted for the big screen, The Rainmaker lacks heart. The performances are okay, the cast quite good, but there’s no driving plot that keeps the movie on track. There’s plenty of story: young lawyer (Matt Damon) takes on big insurance company, meets abused girl he falls in love with, goes to court for the first time, etc. But it all feels kind of forced, as if the script just needed another good re-write to get it where it needed to be.

But then it got me thinking that even making a mediocre movie that 10 years later feels dated and looks like it belongs on the Superstation, means that Hollywood hasn’t changed all that much. All this moaning and groaning about the box office slump that’s continued into this year hasn’t made the movies any better; it’s just made people more conscious of the fact that the formula doesn’t always work. The Rainmaker has all the right ingredients for a blockbuster but it just doesn’t come out of the oven fully baked.

So, a funny story.

My RRHB called me at work on Monday and said, “Did you notice that the stuff next to the garage has been cleared away?”

I thought about it for a minute. In fact, I had sort of noticed, but more that it smelled like sh*t than it had been all cleared up.

Take a moment to note that our backyard is a mess. It’s two concrete tubs full of dirt that generally holds all of the garbage and debris from whatever the RRHB has demolished in the house until he gets a bin. Right now, it’s holding an old van door of my brother’s and an awning, along with broken bits of wall, floor and other stuff. It’s a white trash dream yard. Britney would be right at home.

He continues, “The neighbour has planted lettuce.” Pause. “At least it looks like lettuce. I can’t tell.”

Yes, our next door neighbour has taken it upon himself to greenify our backyard. This is in addition to pruning our grape vine that grows and planting bulbs in the front of our house. There are now tiny sprouts of lettuce growing where the cats have crapped and the mice have lived all winter long (he cleared away all of the crap we had piled there).

Do you think he’s trying to tell us something? And more importantly, does he think I’ll actually eat the lettuce? Getting over the fact that it grew outside where my cat, ahem, plays might be a bit too hard for old obsessive-compulsive Ragdoll.

Building Green (link via Grist), a new show on environmentally friendly renovation, is coming to PBS this summer. I hope we get it on our Buffalo station. It looks fascinating. But seeing the amount of garbage we’ve already created from renovating (three separate visits from the bin guy; more than one bin per drop), I doubt whether there’s a possibility of being anything other than environmental terrorists when it comes to gutting and renovating a house.

I guess, the idea is to get it back in ‘green dollars.’ To use your money towards better products on the renovation proper, conserve energy and do your best to make up for all the crap you’ve sent to the landfill.

So, I went to see the super-fancy disease doctor yesterday morning. He was behind which meant that it took a lot longer than usual to see him and when I did see him he was quite abrupt:

SFDD: “Are you better yet?”

Ragdoll: “Not really. I’m not taking any medicine to make me better.”

SFDD: “Well, if you’re seeing me that means you’re going to get better.”

Ragdoll sits there with a stupified look on her face. He then sort of stumbled through my file. Oh, and the 24-hour urine test? Yeah, he didn’t even look at the results. Oh, and the bone scan? Says it’s useless without the MRI (which I did last night too), but more on that later.

The end result? I’m going to start taking methotrexate by injection once a week. And because the drug leaches Folic Acid out of your system, I’ve got to take it too. The side effects of this new drug are sores in the mouth, upset tummy (been there, done that) and, in rare cases, pneumonia-like symptoms.

I called my RRHB after I saw the doctor and said, “What do you want to bet that’s what I end up with?” He laughed, and then told me I was being kind of negative, which is true, but every drug I’ve tried to take over the last few months has had me end up in side effect hell, if such a place exists.

And speaking of side effects, my left hip has really been bothering me; it’s a very similar pain to the one that ended up with my right hip being replaced, so I’m a bit freaked out. As I’ve been taking prednisone, which is the cause of avascular necrosis (the technical name for the problem in my hip), I told them right away (the last visit, not the most recent one) about the pain. The intern scheduled a bone density test and an MRI, which I had last night at 10:30 PM.

At about 9:38, I was trying to decide what to watch next on TV when my RRHB said, “Come on, let’s go.” In the span of about three hours, I had totally forgotten that I had to go back to the hospital, had my PJs on, and would have been in bed in about 20 minutes. It’s a good thing he remembered.

It’s a strange thing, having an MRI. You have to wear ear plugs because the machine is so loud and they wrap you up like a mummy, tape your feet together (so your legs don’t move) and then inject you into this tube up past your head. I was stuck in there for over half an hour with the damn thing whirring and whizzing and sounding like a strange techno show. At first I totally panicked and then I calmed down and focused on this pen mark above me. I kept wondering, if all you wear is a hospital gown, how on earth does a pen mark get onto the machine? Is it even a pen mark? What else could it be? On and on my brain went as the machine did its thing.

Lesson learnt? When they offer to give you a sedative, um, take it.

Up next in terms of the Health Quest 2006? I’m going to call the super-fancy disease doctor next week and hound them for the results of the MRI. If my other hip is dying from avascular necrosis, I want to know sooner rather than later. Wouldn’t you?

Douglas Coupland’s latest book, JPod, quite a long one by his standards at 528 pages, might possibly just be one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read. The “JPod” of the title refers to the workspace of Ethan Harrison Jarlewski where he toils away until all hours of the night for a gaming company in Vancouver. He fills each day with absurd challenges, which means doing as little work as humanly possible, getting caught up in the crazy world of online, and programming a game that management seems dead set on ruining with the latest marketing buzz and chasing the “hip” dragon.

Throw in Ethan’s crazy family, his pot growing mother and almost-working actor father, couple this with a cast of supporting characters that include his fellow podmates, mix in a strange group of non-friends from the criminal element of the Vancouver underground and come across an “evil” Douglas Coupland, and you’ve got a racing, urgently satirical, and immensely enjoyable novel.

Filled with pop culture references and staggeringly real in terms of how it portrays life in an interactive chop shop, JPod barrels along from one insane situation to the next, and as crazy as it gets, Ethan seems to take it all in stride. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot of the novel. It’s both perfectly absurd and ridiculously intelligent at the same time. And to give even a hint of the whirlwind insanity between the covers isn’t worth it—it’s a book you’ve got to experience not knowing what’s coming. It’s that good.

I’ve never read anything that so thoroughly captures the idea of working in an online environment (even though Ethan’s a gamer—I’m calling him a kindred spirit) under ridiculous bosses on crazy projects that take up massive amounts of your time, and then someone makes a daft decision that derails everything and you’ve got to start all over again. Put all of this together and once you pick up the book, I’d challenge you to be able to put it down.

There’s a cute site for the book, as well as an amazing interview with his publisher, if you’re looking for more info.

My history with sleep inducing medication is long and well documented. At another time, I’ll dive into the really bad story, but I’d like to give you a few parting shots of wisdom:

Let’s call this my Things Not To Do In The Hour Before The Medication Kicks In List…

1. Attempt to paint your toenails. Not only will you glob the polish on like your nails have the surface of the moon, but you will paint every single toe—notice how I said ‘toe’ and not ‘toenail.’ A-hem. In fact, you might even paint some foot, ankle and skin.

2. Don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy. That show’s a suckerpunch anyway. And when you’re slightly drowsy and relaxed, it’ll turn you into a blubbering idiot who is crying so hard she can barely hold down the sobs.

3. Don’t make any lists about things to do because they will inevitably involve tasks like: must hunt down old BF Chris P. Rice or Robin Linley, if only to add to the absolutely inevitable fact that they’ll be the two people I run into next in the long line of people I’ve been running into lately.

4. Lastly, you probably shouldn’t blog. First rule of blogging: don’t talk about work. Second rule of blogging: don’t talk about work. Third rule of blogging: especially don’t talk about work after you’ve taken your meds and probably won’t even remember this post in the morning.

5. Now, I’m off to sleep. It will be peaceful. It will be restful. It will be non-stressful and give me the much needed energy to get up and go after my incredibly busy weekend.

Can you believe I had time to read only 1 book? The horror!

Okay, just one book ago, I called myself out for reading too much crap. But man, Plum Sykes was scraping the bottom of the barrel, and when I was at conference all week, which is essentially day after day of university lectures, Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger (she of the The Devil Wears Prada fame, soon to be even richer once the film comes out), was all my over-worked brain could handle.

And, just to let you know, I’m halfway through Howard’s End, so there’s no need to be embarrassed by the quality of my reading these days.

The book is not good. Although I’d venture to say it’s not as bad as The Devil Wears Prada, but a lot of the same problems exist. The main character, Bette Robinson, quits her boring job at a banking firm, uses her family connections to score a kick-ass job with a fabulous PR firm in Manhattan and promptly ends up dating the hottest guy on the party circuit. Only wait, they’re not really dating, because [and this is mildly spoilerish so don’t read it if you care about the “plot” of this book] he’s, wait for it, gay. The real love interest comes in the form of a bouncer (with a heart of gold and a bucketful of dreams) named Sammy.

But, of course, the rocky path to their romance is well fraught with obstacles, work obligations, the prying eyes of online gossip columnists, “class” distinctions between the PR people and those who toil on the velvet rope. But honestly, yawn.

The biggest problem is Weisberger’s own voice getting tied up in her characters. More often then not I was wondering why she’d make a point of having her character not know about Birkin bags, to the extent that a new co-worker spends pages upon pages explaining their importance to her, only to have her extol the virtues of their social importance in a way that didn’t feel natural to Bette four chapters later. BTW, the Birkin chapter is what Weisberger read at the IFOA when I saw her; it was cute then, but it’s not enough cute to sustain an entire novel.

And I hate continuity problems. She has a dog she never walks. She goes away on vacation and doesn’t tell us what she did with her pet; it was probably locked up in her tiny Manhattan apartment for the entire week. The character is supposedly Jewish, but that felt totally artificial when it came out, like the author was trying to paint the character by numbers in awkward places within the text. It’s as if the author really and truly wants to create a “character” but can’t get her own voice out of the way long enough for Bette to truly become what she should be.

See, there’s a point to reading bad books: they’re chalk full of things not to do.