my tragic right hip

There’s nothing I love more than a good South African piece of fiction. It’s a strange thing to say, I know, but Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor, with its shades of Coetzee, reads like an exquisite piece of literary art. The parallels to Coetzee’s work are well documented. Almost every reviewer brings it up as a point from which to discuss Galgut’s work.

The story of an older, almost-divorced doctor who works at a nearly abandoned hospital in a former township, The Good Doctor examines the idea of moral ambiguity almost perfectly. Presenting us with a character we can neither love nor hate, we inevitably find ourselves deeply engaged by him anyway. As a young, upstart (…inky pup! I always think, damn you Shakespeare in Love) doctor wends his way both into the life of the protagonist, Frank, and into the routine of the hospital, his whole world changes.

While there is no outward conflict between the two men, there is a deep sense that things will never be the same; it’s a subtle change that time brings, one that comes with a strange subsection of events that have both a cause and an effect, but are so indicative of something post-colonial that it’s refreshingly disturbing to read. Highly recommend it on a rainy day where you were already feeling bad about reading the frightening stats in your newspaper (for example: one in four adults in Zimbabwe have HIV. The US uses 25% of the world’s oil resources, etc) and want a deep, interesting novel to keep you company for a while.

Remember that episode of Sex and the City where Stanford exclaims, as Carrie trips and falls on the runway, “Oh my God, she’s fashion road kill?” Yeah, well, as of Saturday I am officially Bowling Road Kill (tm ragdoll).

That’s right, you heard me, bowling. It was Glark’s birthday and, as was the custom last year, we all went bowling. And, well, I suck. I didn’t fall down flat on my face as Carrie did, but I sure came close. “How?” You ask. Well, first I bowled gutter ball after gutter ball. Then, I swung back my cute pink ball, promptly let go and watched it fly — in the wrong direction. I’m lucky I didn’t kill anyone. Oh, and then I managed to jump up and play in the wrong order, thus ruining Stee’s fabulous track record. But that part was okay because the dude that works the alley fixed it so the score ended up being correct. My friend Wing Chun kept saying, “You’re so pretty. You don’t need to be talented.” Ha!

So yeah, I’m officially Bowling Road Kill. They were all embarrassed to be seen with me. They were all embarrassed to go out with me.

Oh, and it didn’t help much that my Rock and Roll Boyfriend bowled perfect strikes and spares pretty much all afternoon. Sigh.

My short story class is a nightmare and I’m trying to get out of it. My joints ache like I’m having mid-life growing pains but I know it’s the disease and I’m tired of it. My head aches and my mouth is dry, totally dehydrated like I’m stuck in a snowbank with only ice to suck on and it’s just not the same as water in a plastic cup. I’ve run out of sleeping pills, which is why I’m over-tired and dehydrated, and finished my latest course of antibiotics which, when mixed with the not sleeping for the past three days, means I’ll be sick again within the week.

I’m tired of the disease this time around. I don’t know if I have the energy any more to cope.

/of feeling sorry for myself.

Jonathan Tropper’s The Book of Joe is one of the better books I’ve read this year, and it’s been a pretty good year so far. It’s a sweet novel that looks at the life of a successful novelist who wrote disparagingly about the town where he grew up only to return seventeen years later as his father falls into a coma. Tropper’s writing reminds me of Jonathan Franzen, that bittersweet recognition that life hasn’t turned out the way you expected, and that material success sometimes isn’t the answer.

And then, the whole visual image of the book was shattered when I looked up the movie version on the imdb and found out Joe Mantegna is to play “Joe.” Ew. He’s only supposed to be 34, so they must have it wrong.

Highly recommended. The Book of Joe gets the broken hip salute, which essentially means I’d give it a big booty bump if the book was a cute fellow at a rock and roll show.

Tonight was the second class of my “Introduction to Poetry” class. I missed last week because of the Work Conference, and went back to happily find that the really annoying girl from the first class wasn’t there anymore. Isn’t that awful of me? I feel so selfish because I want to know what the teacher thinks of my work, so that I can send it out and see what happens. But I also don’t want to hog the whole class with my own mini-egotistic impression that I’m smarter than everyone else. Because I’m not, but there are only so many bad poems one can come across in one’s lifetime. Thankfully, the other poems discussed tonight weren’t all that bad — lacking polish, but still good.

Of course, I’m terrified of reading in public. The last time I did it actually on a stage I made myself so sick before hand that my period was two weeks late. It stressed me out that much. Tonight, I read a poem called “January (My Violent Heart),” the first in a series of twelve poems I wrote, each with a title of one month out of the year, as it would suggest. When I finished reading it, shaking, stuttering and shivering, the teacher said, “Wow, that’s really strong.” Which was nice but it scared me a little bit because I’ve lost all ability to be objective about my work at this point.

In the end, I did it, sort of half-conquering the feeling that I can’t do it, can’t write, now my only goal at the end of the course is to publish the poems I workshop. We’ll see how lucky I am. I’ll keep you posted.

Is it really necessary for the penguins to walk through airport security? I mean, damn, it’s cute, but what could they possibly be packing?

It’s a strange thing to have a job where you don’t spend more than one or two days straight in one office. I guess that’s how salespeople work, but having never been a salesperson, I’ve had no experience with it. Not to say I don’t like it, but I’m looking forward to spending two days in a row at my main office, getting all my stuff organized from the conference and catching up on my internet gossip.

Wha? Britney’s pregnant? Now that’s scary, someone who takes marriage so very seriously that she gets married and then divorced, ahem, annulled less than 24-hours later. What happens when the warm glow of the insta-family wears off and she’s actually changing diapers and being responsible for another life? Will she stop smoking and walking around barefoot in truck stop restrooms? Um, ew. Maybe the baby’s theme song will be, “Oops, I Did It Again,” as it spirals into the abyss of Hollywood kids with really messed up famous parents.

You go Tom Waits. You have and will always kick ass. Especially for that one great memory I have of you spreading fairy dust all over the stage the last time I saw you live. Big Black Mariah, all right!

I found this on bookninja.com today. A woman has read all of the Oprah Book Club books and then written a book herself about the experience of reading them. Um, considering the entire world read the Oprah Books is this book really necessary? And the last book about reading books I tried to read was Alberto Manguel’s A Reading Diary and it was terribly boring.

We watched the truly bad Walking Tall last night after the Rock and Roll Boyfriend’s parents left. But the best line in the entire film came from Johnny Knoxville’s character Ray, he says as he surveys the scantily clad, half-naked women and ruggedly, ahem, tough characters in the local casino: “This place is full of fake tits and real assholes.”

Heh.

…Isn’t necessarily regret. It’s the stupid antibiotics that I’ve been taking now for almost five weeks straight. No matter what you do, brush your teeth, rise your mouth with wash, gurgle salt water, it still tastes a bitter pill. Funny how life literalizes your metaphors without even asking.

Last night, I went out for dinner with the Rock and Roll in-laws. The boy’s aunt is visiting from New Brunswick and it was a lovely dinner. If you get the chance, have a black bean burrito at Mitzi’s Sister—delicious!

I’m feeling frustrated today because I’ve been taking so much medication for so long and I don’t even know if it’s working. Well, it’s working in the sense that I’m not dying of sickness like I was a few weeks ago but I’m not feeling entirely well either. The disease is funny that way, it sits beneath the surface, sort of floating in the pool of my body waiting patiently to pull me completely down in the undertow.

Needless to say I’m tired of it all, the low white blood cells, the high creatinine, the sickly chest, and the extreme exhaustion. Today, this rainy Sunday in April, where I’m supposed to be making plans for Ireland, curling up in bed reading a book, getting out even though it’s still kind of cold, I’m stuck inside feeling sorry for myself. I’ll change the Boomtown Rats now please—I don’t like Sundays.

It’s kind of neat living in a hotel room for a week. The bed was glorious and it didn’t have those awful, flowered polyester covers either, it had a big plush duvet with a cover that smelled faintly of bleach, meaning it had definitely been washed before I slept in it. Yum!

The food was excellent, but it does get a bit tiring eating buffets all the time. Anyway, there were movies we could rent in the room, so we did. The first night we watched Assault on Precinct 13 now my love for Ethan Hawke knows no bounds at this moment, but the movie was so bad and Brian Dennehy chewed so much scenery it’s no wonder he’s, ahem, a portly older man. Then later on in the week we watched Hitch and it’s no wonder Will Smith’s the world’s biggest box office draw, he’s totally entertaining; it’s just too bad that film falls apart at the end.

The coupe de gras for the week was National Treasure. What a terrible film! Too much like The Da Vinci Code (Sir Ian McKellen shame on you), so utterly predictable, and there’s no way that the silly girl from Troy that launched a thousand boats was any more of a doctor than I am. Silly film — so many of these ridiculous Hollywood blockbusters make so much ridiculous money inflating the egos of has-been stars going through their mid-life crisis, like Nicolas Cage, that it’s makes me sad for the world. Yet, I still watched it, so what does that say about me? Now talk about chewing the scenery — I think that Nicolas Cage might be right up there with Brian Dennehy to win the coveted “Worst Actor of my Work Conference” Award.