Some of the Lessons I Learned at School

 

I was born and raised in Texas. I vaguely remember hearing that at the time I was in school (I only went to public schools for my primary and secondary education) that a public-school education was better than a private one. I don’t know if this is true, but I was told that private-school teachers didn’t have to be certified while public-school ones did. This might have been the story my parents told themselves to not feel guilty about sending me to public school, but I do feel like I got a pretty good education, although there were a few problems with it.

In elementary school, early on in 1^st or 2^nd grade, or possibly even kindergarten, a friend of mine was very chatty. We students would often have to sit on the floor, gathered around the teacher while she taught us something. Do kids in kindergarten still do that? Gather around the teacher, sitting on the floor. I have memories of gathering around the teacher and sitting on the floor as far as 4^th grade. The floors were carpeted, but some teachers had carpet squares stacked in the corner of the room and each kid would go get a carpet square to sit on. It was always disappointing if I didn’t get there fast enough to get a good color and ended up sitting on brown carpet.

Back to the chatty friend. During one of these “gather around the teacher” times, my chatty friend had a lot to say. I crawled around the group moving to the other side to get away from the chatty friend and she followed me. We were friends, but I was, and am, a rule follower. I knew she was about to get in trouble and I wanted to get as far away as possible. It didn’t work. So I turned to her and either said, “quiet,” or “shush” or something. And I got in trouble. I learned that it was possible to get in trouble when other people are the ones being disruptive and you shouldn’t speak up for yourself.

I don’t know what grade of elementary school I was in when the first computers appeared, but I do remember immediately being let down by my education. My elementary school was in a square building. The library, which had no real walls, was in the middle of the room. Smaller classrooms were around the edges of the room. They didn’t have real walls, but rather partitions which slid out of the walls and locked into place, so the size and shape of the classrooms could be changed. The grades of students went around the room clockwise. Stepping into the room, the kindergarten kids were closest to the door on the left. The fifth graders were closest to the door to the right. The other grades went around the edges in order.

Because of the layout of the building, I’m going to guess I was in at least 3^rd grade when this happened. We were sat at a row of computers with a very simple test on the screen. One question at a time was shown. Only one question stands out. Fill in the blank with either “to,” “too” or “two.” I knew that “two” was the number, but I was never actually taught the difference between “to” and “too.” I looked helplessly at the girl seated beside me and she acted like this was common knowledge. In other words, not something that even needed to be taught. We were expected to know it going in. I took a guess, and I’m pretty sure that I got the right one, but I knew, without any doubt, this was a failing of my education and not of my ability to learn things. I was never taught the difference so I never learned the difference. I learned that basic things are sometimes skipped over.

I don’t blame my parents for any blind spots. I actually think my mom did a better job than most moms when it came to sending me off to school with a basic education. I didn’t need to learn the alphabet or how to count from my teachers. My mom took care of that. And she was always reading, so I had a role model who was never without a book. Sure, they were romance novels, but she ran through them two or three each week.

I did hate English class, but I paid attention. The class I would daydream in was math, because I was good and math and caught on quickly. That left me a lot of time do think about other things. Once, during independent study, I started to read a book and was scolded for not continuing to stare at the math pages. I didn’t need to stare at the math pages, because I got it! But I learned then that there was theater involved in being a student. You had to pretend you were learning something, even after you had learned it.

I think the main thing I learned during middle school was that people are mean. I was sometimes mean, too. I’m sorry to anyone I was mean to. Believe me, I was on the receiving end of mean behavior and comments infinitely more often than I did mean things. I’m pretty sure I also apologized after I realized I was being mean.

In high school, when we signed up for classes, we got a list of the classes offered and had to pick what we wanted to take. Physical Education was required for at least 2 years in high school-- maybe more? I don’t remember. The first day of 9^th grade I went to my chosen PE class: tennis. The coach tossed a ball to me, I hit the ball, and I was told I had to drop the class and take “regular” PE. The tennis class was only for students who could already play tennis who would then be on the tennis team. I learned that not all of the classes offered were there for learning. Some were there for the school to win awards and the learning part of some of the classes took place at country clubs on the weekends.

I took bowling by correspondence. It was a lot of fun and I didn’t have to change clothes at school.

Back to middle school now. In middle school I started taking French class and I continued French in high school. One French teacher I had was preparing a class trip to Paris. I wasn’t going, but I heard a lot about the planning. I was also in French Honor Society, so there is a chance that’s where the planning for the trip to Paris was focused. The students who were going to travel to France were given a dire warning by this teacher. I’m paraphrasing:

“In France, if you get injured, even slightly, they will take you to a hospital and treat you, even if you don’t want to be treated. You don’t want this to happen to you. Don’t get hurt. Make sure you have insurance to get treatment when you get back to the US and if something happens, shout at them that you don’t want to get treated.”

Huh. I knew that the teacher was telling us something that she thoughts was unbelievably bad. Dangerous. Unwelcomed medical treatment. But I couldn’t understand exactly why it was bad. She didn’t say you wouldn’t be able to afford it. I think she said something about France being socialist. I told my parents the story and tried to convey the same terror the teacher had in her voice. They didn’t seem too interested. I wasn’t going on the trip anyway. I took money with me to school and bought a sweatshirt from Paris when the students returned. They bought extras to sell to those of us who weren’t going. I learned how the conservative politics of teachers is passed on to the students.

During high school, I got my driver’s license. Most kids in Texas (and maybe the US?) do this as an exciting right of passage. Since my sister was two years older than me, I didn’t bother to do this in the same way as kids on TV shows and movies do. On TV, as soon as a kid turns 15 they go in for their driver’s permit and start learning to drive. They either enroll in driving school or their parents teach them. My parents taught my sister how to drive. I was going to driving school whether I wanted to or not. But I still had an unwilling chauffeur in my sister, so I didn’t actually go to driving school until I was already 16.

Getting a driver’s license involved getting the learner’s permit and then passing the road test. You had to pass the written test before you got your learner’s permit. I failed my first road test because we didn’t learn to parallel park at driving school. The second test, I just backed into the spot and said, “I’m not doing this.” I got full marks off for it, but didn’t fail that time.

The year after I got my driver’s license, Texas stopped requiring the road test for new drivers if they had been to driving school. A quick Google of this and it looks like they require the road test again. But for a while, it wasn’t required. I thought this wasn’t fair and I learned that the people driving in Texas might not be qualified.

My college experience is something for another post, but eventually I went to the University of North Texas (UNT), and that’s where I finished my BA. My major was in Radio/TV/Film and I got a minor in French.

Because I had studied at a number of different colleges before settling down, I had taken French 1 twice already (not counting in 8^th and 9^th grades), and I took it again at UNT. I could have taken some tests to get out of it, but I learned that each school thinks the education they offer is superior to any other school. When I got out of high school, I could have also taken tests to get skip over some basic math and English classes since I had taken AP classes, but I opted to not take the AP (advanced placement) test. This just reiterated that I’m too lazy to take tests to get out of doing work. I’d rather have an easy A than the stress of a test.

When I enrolled at UNT, all students were required to have a major and a minor, and two years of a foreign language (12 hours). I had studied French since 8^th grade, and was happy to continue with it in college. To get a minor in French, you only needed three years (18 hours). One of my French teachers was trying to get me to change my major to French. When a summer program in French came up, where students went overseas to study, she helped me get accepted into it, no doubt thinking it would convince me that I really wanted to be a French major. The summer program counted as 6 hours. I was already at my 12 hours required for graduation, so this 6 hours would give me the minor and a summer in Nice. My parents were surprised I wanted to do this, but they let me do it.

If you know me personally, you know I am an introvert. I’m happy to do things with friends…one friend at a time. Maybe I can handle going somewhere with two friends at once, but more than that and I’m not only going to uncomfortable, but I’m going to be very quiet. Going to France to study in a program like this is not something that introverts usually do. We stay at home, inside, alone, with our cats. We have cats. But I like to push myself into uncomfortable situations and I really wanted to do this.

On the plus side, I was able to get a single room. I actually think all of the dorm rooms on campus were single rooms. It was a sparse room with a bed near the window, a desk and a sink! The window had shutters on it that you cranked open and closed. When they were closed, the room was as dark as if it was night.

The first day of classes, we all had to take assessment tests to find out which classes we belonged in. Oh! My favorite! I tested at or near the top, to be put in the most advanced classes. There were two classes each day that I had to take, as far as I remember. In the morning, we (the students) went to the grammar class. Written French. In the afternoon, we went to the conversation classes. Spoken French. Oops! I think I was only in the very small (four students including me) advanced conversation class for one day before the teacher was like, “You’re dropping down a level.” I didn’t mind.

I was at a huge disadvantage when it came to speaking and hearing French - most of my teachers had had heavy southern accents. American southern accents. Texas, y’all. This was also in the beforetime, when there were three or four French movies available on video in all of Texas and I had seen them all. And one, a movie starring Christophe Lambert, was dubbed into English. I couldn’t go to YouTube, or Netflix, to watch French movies and TV shows to work on my listening comprehension.

I liked the other class better. It was a much larger group of people - maybe 30? It felt like a normal class. There wasn’t as much pressure to perform. We learned the words to La Vie en Rose and La Mer. On the last day of class, after almost everyone had left the classroom, the teacher came over to me and said, in English, “I don’t know why you came here. You are the wrong person.” I learned that teachers aren’t supportive of students trying to push themselves.

Obviously, it still bothers me. I didn’t tell my parents about it, but it made my trip end sourly. I got my minor, still took another French class (phonetics), since I really liked the French teacher at UNT, and have gone back to Nice again. It was a good trip and I’m glad I went. It defined part of me.

I also had over 18 hours of study in music, but there was one required music theory class, at 8:30 in the morning, and no minor could be received without taking that class. I learned, about myself, that even if a goal is easy and within reach, I won’t reach for it if it requires waking up early.

While I was at UNT, I also decided to take an art class - watercolor painting. Part of being in college, I thought, was experiencing new things. I had never taken an art class before. It was a bit like tennis all over again. The teacher didn’t want me there. He told me that he didn’t want me there, giving me a chance to drop the class before it got to be too late. I didn’t really understand what the problem was. Most of the other students were hostile toward me. The teacher accused me of having my sister (who was in an art program) of doing my homework paintings. (She did not, but she did offer some input - more helpful than any input from the teacher, obviously.) Despite my grades averaging to a B-, he gave me a C in the class. He called one of my paintings trite. I learned that there are some closed clubs, with no reason why they are closed, and trying to get into them just leads to frustration and tears.

Before I graduated from UNT, where I only studied 2 ½ years, the requirement that students have two years of a foreign language was dropped. And then the requirement that a student have a minor was dropped. Just like how I felt about the driving test, I felt about this college dumbing down that I was witnessing. I learned that things were going to be harder for me than for people born just one year after me.

After college I went to work for 5 years and had my first nervous breakdown. It wasn’t officially diagnosed, but that’s what it was. For some reason, it is ok, and maybe even expected, in the US for people to be miserable at work to the point of crying in their cars during their lunch breaks and when they get home at night. I knew that something had to change and I decided that I needed to go back to school.

After being in the “real world” for five years, being back in college to get my Master’s Degree was a breeze. You mean all I have to do is read and write things? I don’t have to worry about a creepy client making passes at me during a 33-hour shift? And that if I’m not polite about the passes we could lose a lot of work and money? I don’t have to overhear other clients talking about how much they hated my work? I don’t have to politely listen while Pauly Shore tells me I made him look like an idiot in his reel? Did I mention all of the unwanted sexual advances? Being in school was what I needed. I could afford to put myself through California State University, Northridge, CSUN, so that's where I went.

I was lucky enough to TA (be a teaching assistant) for my favorite professor. As part of my TA work, I had to give a couple of the lectures. I shared my hesitation at lecturing with the professor. Did I really know what I was talking about? Did he want to review what I was going to say to make sure it was right? Will the students believe what I’m saying? Yes, he assured me, they will believe you. You are in charge. Just say what you want to say with confidence and it will be right. I learned that even the professor I admired more than any teacher I’d ever had before was just winging it to some extent. Confidence counts for a lot - probably for more than being correct. The topic was screenwriting, so it wasn’t like a math class, where being correct counts more than anything else. But is writing, and creative things, confidence is the most important thing.

These are just the bad things I learned. They were lessons the teachers didn’t even know they were teaching. But someone is always paying attention and learning from you. I’m sure I learned good things, too, but the bad things are the things that stick out. 

Anyway, here's a watercolor I did of my dorm room in France:

 

Camille Awards for Excellence - March 2022

 

If you have followed my blogging for years, then you know I occasionally will have my own awards season. Usually I do this in December or January, but the pandemic has rendered time meaningless. With the news today (March 5, 2022) that Taskmaster is getting its own streaming services, I decided it was time to hand out my awards again. Although looking back over my current blog - the one you are reading - it looks like I haven’t found anything excellent since starting this blog.

The Camille Awards for Excellence have no set categories and no requirements as to how many there are or, apparently, when they are handed out. The only thing that is required is that something be excellent. I am the arbiter of excellence. Past winners include Jim Parsons and Richard Ayoade. Maybe the episodes of Doctor Who with David Tennant and Catherine Tate? If I didn’t bother to give them an award at the time, I’m giving them one now, retroactively.

The pandemic changed a lot of things, and in the early days it shut down new TV shows and movies. This proved to be an excellent opportunity for shows from other countries to make their way to the United States. As you may have guessed, based on my previously given awards, I am a little bit of an Anglophile. It should come as no surprise that my current batch of excellence awards are all for British panel shows.

The first award goes to Taskmaster. Thanks to the creator and star, Alex Horne, apparently being smart enough to own rights to the show or to convince whoever does own them that YouTube was a great distributor, he was able to start a Taskmaster YouTube channel. The first 8 series are now available there. They were originally spaced out during 2020, with one new episode each week and then there was a tragic miscalculation. Series 8 and 9 were commissioned to the WB and taken off of the air after episode one of series 8. The rest of the series is now on YouTube, but for a while you could only watch it on CW Seed (which I don’t think exists now). Series 9 is in limbo, but there was an announcement on March 5, 2022 that it will be available on the new Taskmaster streamer in April 2022. I’m looking forward to that. I’ve watched Series 1-8 at least twice, some episodes more than that, and don’t doubt I’ll watch them all again.

The second award goes to The Unbelievable Truth. You can get it in the US on Audible, or wait for illegal uploads to YouTube. It is a radio production, so the YouTube version just has a static picture that goes with it. Kids-- A radio show is just like a podcast, but with regularly scheduled times to listen to it on the radio. I had heard a lot about TUT from guests on QI (another show which I might have given an award to, and if not, it gets one now, blah, blah, blah), but had never actually heard it or even been interested in seeking it out. I’m giving Series 21, Episode 5 a secondary award for being one of the funniest things I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. Go listen to it. You’re welcome.

And finally, I want give another retroactive award, assuming I haven’t actually given it one before, to Would I Lie to You. Now available in the US through BritBox, although I was first introduced to it via illegal YouTube uploads. It, and QI, are the main reasons I have a BritBox subscription. Now if they would only add new episodes of Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled, that would be great.

Anyway, the world is currently a terrible place and Russia might destroy us all. So until that happens, these shows help keep my spirits up. If the winners want an actual prize, all they have to do is ask. I’ll work something up. I suspect they aren’t bothered, though.

Let me add a picture now, because the blog looks better in my list of blogs if it has a picture. This has nothing to do with the awards. A sunflower from my yard and my painting of it.

Ruth Allen's Sunrise Around the World

 If you didn't know, I've been going with some friends of mine to sing/entertain at an assisted living center every Wednesday afternoon for several years. We weren't able to go there during the original COVID-19 lockdowns. When they had to go back into lockdown from Omicron, we decided to start live streaming our singalong so they could still have some entertainment. Here's the one we did last week:

We'll be live streaming again this week, so if you are reading this before Jan 26, 2022, please drop by YouTube to watch on Wednesday at 3:30 pm Pacific. If you are reading this after Jan 26, 2022, you should be able to find the archive of the live stream on my YouTube channel.

Starting Off 2022 With a Painting

 

I got some oil pastels for Christmas. Not exactly as a surprise, since they were on my Amazon wish list. I have done a lot of paintings with soft/chalk pastels, but I wanted to try the oil ones. VERY DIFFERENT!

Anyway, someone I’m friends with on Facebook posted a picture of their cat last year that I thought would make a good painting, so that’s what I did as my first oil-pastel trial. Here is Jasmine.

New Year’s Resolutions - 2022!

 Happy new year! It’s today! Today! The first day of a new year. You may not know this about me, but I like to set a yearly challenge for myself. I don’t think of it as a resolution. It isn’t vague like “be healthier,” or “be more connected with family.” It is something a little more specific. Often, I ask myself to do one thing a month, like last year’s “read a book each month,” which by March changed into “consume a book each month,” since, turns out, I absolutely hate reading. I finished out the goal by listening to audiobooks. It was still a challenge for me and I’ve not listened to an audiobook in about a month, since finishing up my December book early - in November.

One year I did a painting a month. Toward the end, they got to be a little simplistic, but I did them. One year I was going to record a song each month, but my mom got really sick and life interfered with my ability to learn and/or write songs. One year it was “say yes to everything,” which didn’t mean everything, but I said yes to anything I thought might be remotely fun/interesting to do. I went to a lot of shows at Largo that year and have some great memories, but again, there were a few tickets purchased that I ended up not using. Something can sound like a great idea in one month and sound like a not great idea when the day comes.

Well, the pandemic makes a “say yes to everything” year a bad idea. And even though I’d love to set a goal involving travel or going to places, that would just be setting myself up for failure this year. Maybe for 2023 I can do that. After last year’s monthly goal, I don’t want to do that again, at least not right away. So instead, I’ve come up with a little list of 2 things I’d like to accomplish by the end of the year. They are things which will require putting in some work, so not something I can wait until next December to do. Here we go:

 1.      Learn how to properly record a song, probably in Audacity, with multiple tracks. I’m only planning one song here, a song I started writing in 2015 when my dad died and my mom got really sick. I want to finish it and do a semi-decent recording of it and not just a “put the phone on the piano” version.

2.    2.   Learn how to draw a cat. It doesn’t have to be a lifelike cat. It can be cartoonish, but a little bit better than the wonky stick figure cat that would happen if I tried now. (I’ll try now to get a baseline starting point.) But I want to be able to draw a cat without looking at pictures of cats to copy. I’m not sure I can do this, but I’m going to give it a try. By the end of they year, at minimum, I want to have one stock cat I can draw. At maximum, I’d like to be able to draw an assortment of cats in different poses.

I think that’s it for this year. That’s enough, right? I will still try to be healthier. I’ll keep trying to get to the garden for more walking. I’ll try to be more focused on my personal writing to get a few big projects really going. I want to really tidy my house and loft. I want to get better on guitar and piano. I’ll try once more to get my roses to mate. (You read that right.) I want to make more YouTube videos and still want to get my channel re-monetized. But I don’t want to put undo pressure on myself to accomplish those goals. Those are the standing goals. They don’t depend on the calendar page turning from December 31 to January 1.

Okay, 2022. Let’s do this! Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.

My terrible unaided attempt at a cat:

Hard to believe I'm looking at several live cats while this happened.

P.S. (added Jan. 2): I would also like to learn how to rip an apple in half, ala Bob Mortimer.

Am I a Picky Eater?

 If you know me, then you probably think I’m a picky eater. The biggest thing you have to overcome is that I don’t eat meat. I haven’t eaten meat in over 20 years. I can’t give you an exact date or time when I decided to stop eating meat. It was a natural progression.

Growing up, Saturday night in my family was steak night. My dad would usually cook the steaks outside on the barbeque grill. It was Texas, so unless it was raining there were only a few weekends in the year when the weather was too cold for grilling outside. I don’t remember ever having a steak. I just remember hating steak.

Since it was steak night and the meat was being barbequed, it didn’t take long for my parents to stop buying steaks for me and instead buying chicken breast. Slathered in enough barbeque sauce and cooked to being charred, I could usually force down a small chicken breast, although sometimes it became an episode of Let’s Make a Deal with me convincing my parents I had actually eaten enough of the meat to not drop dead from a protein deficiency.

I remember eating hot dogs and bologna when we lived at our first house, so before I was 12 or so, but at some point I jettisoned those items from my diet. I was sent to elementary school with a bologna sandwich in my lunchbox and would convert it into either a mayonnaise sandwich or a potato chip sandwich once I was at school and it was time to eat. I pulled a lot of slices of bologna out of sandwiches in my youth, throwing them in the trash at school. If you gave me a hamburger from a fast-food place, I usually pulled the patty out after a little over half-way and refused to eat another bite of it.

When I finally moved into my own apartment, in my early 20s, meat was not allowed in the house. If my mom came to visit, she could buy meat for herself but it had to all be gone by the time she left, or I was throwing it away. I think for a few visits she thought just by leaving a bunch of meat in my refrigerator I’d feel guilty and eat it after she left. Well, she gave up on that fantasy pretty quickly.

I don’t understand the vegetarian who adds meatless meaty things in their diet. I don’t like meat. I don’t understand meat. (I think the world of animals and have trouble convincing myself that any animal would taste good enough to justify killing it.) I don’t eat meat. I’d rather have a hamburger bun, tomato, lettuce, onion, ketchup and cheese without a Beyond Burger than with one. I will order a hamburger without the meat at fast-food restaurants and sit-down restaurants alike. If I’m eating a veggie burger, I want the patty to be made of recognizable vegetable parts with the consistency of vegetables.

Other than meat, I can’t stand peppers. This goes for anything called a “pepper” ranging from a bell pepper to a jalapeño to a peppadew to the black pepper you might crack over a salad from a comically large grinder. Again, this was hard for my mom to understand. She’d buy pepper when she would come to visit and if she was cooking, I had to remind her not to put any pepper in the food until it was on her plate. If there is black pepper in my food and I bite into a piece of it my meal is pretty much over. My mouth is on fire and I can’t taste anything else.

I am one of those cilantro people. If I order something in a restaurant and don’t realize it has cilantro in it, I’ll spend the meal wondering why the kitchen doesn’t rinse their plates and utensils better to clean off the soap residue. Disgusting! I’ve never been eating something and thought to myself, “This would be improved by a little drop of dish-washing liquid.”

Beets taste like dirt. Brussels sprouts make me want to throw up. Green beans? Yuck.

I don’t know what got me to researching the topic, but somehow I found myself looking at some articles about “super-tasters” and reading comments from these super-tasters. Aside from super-tasters supposedly not liking sweet foods, like cake and cookies, I fall into the category. I’ve never been tested, but it would explain a lot.

As the articles all go on to explain, super-tasters don’t have an edge over normal-tasters or non-tasters. It has nothing to do with having a good palate. They/We are tortured by food to some extent. Things taste supercharged. So yes, beets taste like dirt. Cilantro tastes like soap. Coffee, although it smells good, tastes terrible and I’m not going to try to get past that.

We like our meals to be “bland.” We avoid hot sauce and spicy foods. A trip I took to an Indian restaurant with friends a few years ago turned out to be a terrible decision on my part. There was nothing there that tasted even remotely edible. I felt terrible for making my friends feel terrible that there was nothing but rice for me to eat. And at a Japanese restaurant, I’ll probably eat rice. At any restaurant known for their flavorful, exotic cuisine, I’ll probably just eat rice. (I love rice.)

Bland food isn’t bland to us. It has a lot of flavor. I like acidic foods and sweet foods. I love balsamic vinegar. A caprese salad is one of my favorite things to eat. I go through lemons like they are going out of style. I’ve developed a taste for kalamata olives, but don’t try to feed me a green olive. I can taste the differences in bottled water and, by the way, Dasani water should be illegal to sell it tastes so bad.

I’ve recently been trying to incorporate “an apple a day” into my life, to, as the saying goes, keep the doctor away. As part of this, I’ve tried changing up the apple types I buy. Some of them, even when they are advertised as sweet, are so bitter to me that I can only manage a few bites before the apple goes in the trash.

If you love hot sauce on your foods, you probably are a non-taster or on that end of the spectrum of taste. It doesn’t mean you don’t taste anything, it just means you need a lot of help with your food. You need hot sauce. You need spices. You need pepper. I don’t.

I’m not a picky eater, food just tastes different to me than it does to you.

December Book Report and Some Thoughts on the Year: Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

 

The collection of essays, Me Talk Pretty One Day by humorist David Sedaris, starts with a story of how in elementary school he was taken out of classes to attend speech therapy sessions. Rather than having his speech corrected, he worked around things by expanding his vocabulary to avoid the words with the “s” sounds he was deemed to be not good enough at. What follows are essays woven around the loose theme of talking/speech, presented in (from what I remember) chronological order, following his upbringing in North Carolina, his young adulthood in New York and his adulthood in New York and France. The tendency to choose different words as a workaround for speech problems continued into his adulthood. Rather than learn the genders of words in French, he would order things in multiples, since a “la” or “le” word transforms into a gender-neutral “les” when pluralized.

I found the book to be enjoyable, but largely forgettable. I was most interested in the stories about France, where he would give literal translations of things he tried to say in French and how the sentence structure was different and sounded juvenile in English. But the way he only presented the English end of the translations left me wanting to hear him say the thing again in French. When he talked about his first trip to France where one of the only words he knew was “bottleneck,” I longed for him to tell me the French word for “bottleneck.” Looking it up, Google Translate offers three different choices. Was he saying goulot? I’ll never know. And this is the kind of thing that really bothers me.

There were sections where I laughed, which is a pretty good endorsement, but sitting here today, I can’t tell you where those sections were or what they were about. I’ve forgotten them.

I didn’t actually read this book, I listened to it. It was read by the author. His voice, if you haven’t heard it, is similar to Droopy Dog from the old cartoons. A little southern, a little lispy, a little depressed. It was fine, really, but it drew attention to itself. For a book called Me Talk Pretty One Day, having the voice of the reader be another character in the stories works. A friend who adores David Sedaris was a little miffed that I told her my book report wasn’t going to be an overwhelming lovefest. She adores him and would listen to him saying just about anything. Sure, I feel this way about David Mitchell (the other one) and Richard Ayoade, but I do not share the passion for David Sedaris. I guess I need an English accent along with the whine to really enjoy it.

As far as the production goes, some of the chapters in the audiobook were recorded live in front of audiences and music was added in places, as chapter bumpers and during the live readings. I found this a little jarring.

Did I love it? No. Did I hate it? No. I’m sort of indifferent. If my friend said, “This other book is so much better. Listen to that one!” I would consider it. But I’m unlikely to seek out another of his books/essay collections on my own. It was whatever.

****

Anyway, I’ve finished my New Years Resolution of a book a month. Yay, me! What have I learned from this experience? I think I already knew it, but just reinforced that I actually hate reading, but I love books. Holding something with ideas inside, looking at the covers, smelling the pages…all great. Filling bookcases? Love it. Going to a bookstore? Love it. Finding a book with a cover drawn by Edward Gorey and adding it to my collection? Love it. But actually sitting and reading a book one of the worst things you can ask me to do. I guess that’s why it took me 10 years to edit my own novel. The idea of sitting down and having to read the thing was torture. Listening to books is better than reading them. But did I “enjoy” it? No. If I had, then the extra books I still have in my Audible library wouldn’t be sitting there, unlistened to. I actually finished this book in November and since then I’ve spent maybe another 30 minutes listening to a book. Knowing I was done and that I just had to write up the book report lifted a weight from my shoulders and no book has enticed me since then.

I’d like to blame my job for my disliking of reading. For work, I have to read a lot of screenplays. Sometimes I have to read a screenplay because of the continuity I’m writing and sometimes I’ll take work proofreading them. Reading = Work. For relaxation, I’m much more likely to put on a record. Listen to music. Practice piano or guitar. Write my own stuff. Do some crocheting or make some jewelry. Dig up weeds in the yard. Pull out my pastels and make some art. Sometimes I can put on an audiobook while I’m doing those other things, but just as often I’ll put on music. Or talk radio. Or a podcast. Or I’ll start the series of QI running at A and let it go. Background noise. A book isn’t background noise. It demands attention and mostly I don’t want to give it that attention.

Next year, my resolution will not involve books or reading.