The Worst Segway Yet

We know the story. Young girl, known to be an overachiever. The one who has all the answers. One year at school she takes on more than she can handle. She resorts to an outside influence. Something that makes keeping up with her schedule possible. She keeps it a secret from her friends, but finally it's too much. Things begin to fall to pieces.

Hermione Granger and the Time-Turner, you say?

Hermione's immense workload finally seemed to be getting to her. Every night, without fail, Hermione was to be seen in a corner of the common room, several tables spread with books, Arithmancy charts, rune dictionaries, diagrams of Muggles lifting heavy objects, and file upon file of extensive notes; she barely spoke to anybody and snapped when she was interrupted.

No. Idiot. Obviously it's Jessie Spano.

Sometimes I think very fondly of you, hypothetical reader. And sometimes, let's be honest, you make me sick.

Also, Hermione takes Arithmancy seriously? It's just divination by numbers. She hates divination.

Maybe you also guessed that it was Jessie. Maybe you also watched several episodes of this tv show after school every day. Maybe, in other words, you were cool. Or at least you knew what cool looked like and wanted to be a part of a group of sociopaths who ruled their school while their despondent principal slowly watched his power degrade along with any semblance of self-esteem he once had.

Cool definitely looks like too-high Z Cavaricci jeans and very, very brightly colored geometrical shapes on your shirt, by the way. Or, in the case of one Lisa Turtle, a penchant for leopard prints. Listen. I don't make the dang rules.

You guys I am totally JK. This show was and is a living nightmare. Every adult involved with its creation should be punished. There is no statute of limitations on psychological trauma like this. As far as I'm concerned every dollar earned on this monstrosity is blood money. I am convinced that the cursed currency that touched the hands of its writers, producers, creators, directors, even camera operators went on to lead to the eventual Great Recession. Science has shown that every foreclosed house, every lost job, every 99 percenter who pooped in a bag outside of Wall Street there is one of these tainted ducats. This show was rubbish.

Eat a pile of garbage, Saved by the Bell. Just rotten garbage. The stuff that was created and thrown away in 1989 when you were created and for each subsequent year it aired, including but not limited the Miss Bliss years, College Years, and The New Class. Those half-eaten whoppers and big macs in their earth-unfriendly styrofoam clamshells. You eat it. Wallow in that garbage while you devour it. Fight every seagull that competes for the scraps. Sweep away the rats. Mmm-mm. How do you like it, Saved by the Bell? Now do you know what we suffered?

You do not. You do not know what we suffered because it was not enough. You have not yet even atoned for AC Slater's pants alone. I will need to think on this further.

Speaking of people who have names that are two initials followed by a last name, B.J. Novak wrote a book. You know. Ryan from The Office. I'm sure he likes to be called Ryan From the Office as much as Mark Paul Gosselaar likes to be called "Preppy."

"That was a pretty good segway, me," he said to himself, while addressing himself on a web page.

Do you want to click on a link that won't make your eyes and ears bleed? Click this one. That's an episode of This American Life where one of Novak's stories is dramatically read.

This was a very fun, funny, insightful book, it turns out. I don't seek out books written by comic actors/comedians often, but I'd heard good things. Now you are hearing good things because I'm telling them to you.

John Grisham exhaled, feeling his breath leave his body as he did, like his wife’s yoga instructor had taught him to do that one time. He never went back to that yoga instructor, but he still thought about that session sometimes.

Here's another funny one with swears. *WARNING, THERE ARE SWEARS*

What’s the difference between this school and a happy retirement community?” The room was silent again. “The difference is ’rithmetic! A retired person living by the ocean, just doing a little reading and writing till the end of their days—that’s the dream, right? ‘What do you do all day?’ ‘Some reading, a little writing.’ Sounds idyllic, right? And yet school sucks. Everybody hates it. What’s the difference? ’Rithmetic! It’s time somebody put their finger on this fucking obvious thing.

The swear was in the last sentence.

such an easy compliment

"All eyes are beautiful, I said, which is why it's such an easy compliment."

- B.J. Novak, One More Thing, Stories and Other Stories

as a bowl of lilies

"The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent."

-Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk

Falling for a Gal Named Mabel

Most of you are aware of Blues Clues Season 2 Episode 7 where Steve reads a book titled, A Really Great Book. It is indeed, as Steve tells us, "A really great book."

The guy can hardly put it down. To be honest he's kind of a jerk about it. Steve I am a busy man and I need to know what Blue has got on her mind. She is as mysterious as woman. Her clues as tantalizingly obtuse.

This is pretty much your ol' pal Howie every time I sit down and write a blog. Welcome to today's Reading Time. I'm going to be kind of a jerk about it.

Brief aside: at about minute mark 3:30 Steve dispatches of Blue's paw print by drawing a P on it. I'm unsure about the science behind this, but it does raise an interesting question. In many episodes, these paw prints are clearly sentient. They dance, they smile, they giggle when tickled. And yet, episode after episode, they are clearly murdered. Is this a subversive message from "Hollyweird" telling us to eliminate those that don't fully live up to our standards of intelligence, regardless of ability to feel and experience joy? Is Blue's Clues secretly a Randian/Nietzchean objectivist nightmare?

Guess what? I read good one. Like, you guys, it was just wonderful. A lot of times I just tell you about the book I read and then I let you decide if you want to read it or not based on the very brief handful of things I said about it after rambling on about something, like, barely related. This time I will not let you decide for yourself. You need to read this book. It is A Really Great Book.

Before I get there, though, let me tell you a story about me searching for videos of Blue's Clues. We know about Steve, AKA the Greatest Children's TV Host of all Time. We also know about Joe, AKA Not Steve. Joe does a fine job, I'm sure, but he's just a children's host. He does not transcend the medium. By not being Steve, Joe is actually kind of a turd. Sorry, Joe.

But did you know about Kevin?

DID YOU KNOW ABOUT DUARTE?

Sometimes when I sit down to write a blog about A Really Great Book I do a little research and find out that there are other Steves. Brace yourself, children. This goes deep.

Kevin is the UK Steve. Kevin doesn't get a letter. Kevin gets "the post."

I watched a lot of Kevin, you guys. He's pretty good, but I wonder how much of that is the accent? He's somewhere between Steve and Joe in terms of childlike wonder and self-awareness. He is OK. But Duarte? Duarte gets it.

Like Kevin, this next book comes from across the pond. Like Duarte, it is sublime perfection adorned in earth tones. It is H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald. After the surprising news of the death of her father, Helen (it's a memoir) feels lost. Like most of us would do, she decides to focus her energies on training a northern goshawk.

Oh here we go, you say. This whole Howie's Book Club experiment has been a clever ruse to lull us into a sense of security before the bird sales pitch. And you're right. Here we go.
One of my first great birding experience was seeing a male goshawk, like this beaut above us, in Logan Canyon. I had just this astonishing moment of just me and him staring at each other until he calmly regarded me, pooped, and flew away. It's a pretty rare experience, you guys. I've seen a handful since, but nothing like the long, unobstructed view that day.

That day was interesting, by the way, because of why I was birding. I was out in the woods up in the canyon because there wasn't any work for me to do in the office. Not that day, not the day before, and probably not the next. I was basically laid off. It was kind of a sad day, if we're going to be honest here. A really sad one. And I needed to clear my head. I went for a hike, saw kind of the bird of my lifetime, watched it for quite a long time, and walked back to my car kind of elated and confident.

MacDonald's experience at the beginning of the book is similar to mine. Tough day, sees a gos, day has some focus to it. She just takes it a step further than I did and decides she wants to devote her every waking moment to training one. The way she writes about it is just the best prose I've read in so long.

Rabbit was born, grew up in the field, ate dandelions and grass, scratched his jaw with his feet, hopped about. Had baby rabbits of his own. Rabbit didn’t know what lonely was; he lived in a warren. And rabbit is now just a carefully packed assemblage of different kinds of food for a hawk who spends her evenings watching television on the living-room floor. Everything is so damn mysterious. Another car passes. Faces turn to watch me crouched with rabbit and hawk. I feel like a tableau at a roadside shrine. But I’m not sure what the shrine is for. I’m a roadside phenomenon. I am death to community. I am missing the point.”

MacDonald's goshawk is named Mabel, following a long standing superstition among falconers. "...a hawk's ability is inversely proportional to the ferocity of its name. Call a hawk Tiddles and it will be a formidable hunter; call it Spitfire or Slayer and it will probably refuse to fly at all." Mabel is pretty much the epitome of the Other that you heard about in intro to lit class. If you didn't have intro to lit or philosophy, Sartre basically said that we can only know our own existence when we see ourselves through the perception of someone or something very different. Watching herself through Mabel's eyes, MacDonald learns a lot.

I say that like I've read Sartre other than this quick Wikipedia search I just did.

Also I'm aware that I started out this post talking about Blue's Clues and ended it with Sartre. Do your precious Buzzfeed top ten lists do that, I ask you? Do not answer, Dear Hypothetical Reader, as the question was rhetorical and I can't hear your answer. We are but two human beings communicating across a vast space, even if you are somehow reading this near to me. The fiber optic tubes and switches between us make us seem close, and yet are as far apart as infinity itself. The way I see the world may seem similar or different, but in reality our perception may be as distinct as that which exists between a human woman and a big smelly bird.

What I'm saying is maybe you like Joe and that's OK.

They look at the sky too much.

"A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but... there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like they can't quite remember where they are. They look at the sky too much. They lose touch with their feet. They aren't a patch on women except they're better at fixing cars and playing football, just what we need for the improvement of the human race, right?"
-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

I had not imagined it was possible.

"No one had ever told me goshawks played. It was not in the books. I had not imagined it was possible. I wondered if it was because no one had ever played with them. The thought made me terribly sad."

-Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk