Free Rice!

Ok, I swear I'll have a real post up here sometime soon, but for now I'm just going to plug FreeRice. It's a really simple concept: answer a multiple choice question correctly and they donate ten grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. I first came across it a couple years ago and quickly became obsessed. Back then it was a simple vocabulary test, and you moved up a level for every three you got right and down a level for every one you missed. Now in addition to English vocabulary, you can test yourself in English grammar, Italian, French, German, Spanish, pre-Algebra, multiplication, world capitals, geography, chemistry, and famous paintings.

So check it out. It's the perfect time-waster at work: addictive, fun, and educational. Plus, when your boss inevitably catches you playing it he can't get too mad: it's all to end world hunger.

Fortune Cookie FTW/WTF

So I went out for Chinese the other night. It was good. We got Shrimp with Candied Walnuts and Honeydew and Orange Peel Beef and Seared Mushrooms. It was sweet and spicy and tangy and delicious. We had a nice time. Then the really unfriendly waitress brought the bill and our fortune cookies. I eagerly cracked mine open, hoping it said something about adventure or romance or my bright future. Here's what it said:

"You shouldn't overspend at the moment. Frugality is important."

Really, fortune cookie? I hadn't realized that going on five months of unemployment with three dollars to my name, I shouldn't blow it all on a mink stole. I'll have to cancel my order.

Maybe I should cut the fortune cookie some slack. During these tough times, with the housing crisis, the credit crunch, massive unemployment, our banking system in shambles, the cookie probably figured that's solid advice that could apply to any number of people, even the gainfully employed. I'll try not to take it so personally. Let's see what the boyfriend got.

"Your financial outlook is excellent."

Oh, screw you, fortune cookie.

Looking On The Bright Side

From Carolyn Hax's live chat today:

Somewhere, USA: Realtime crisis. I had an affair four years ago with a woman I met at my wife's office. The woman pushed and pushed for a more serious commitment, but I decided to focus that attention on my marriage and backed out of the affair. I never told my wife--I don't believe any good would have come of doing so.

Now it's now. My wife had several lateral moves throughout the year and as of this Monday will be reporting directly to that woman, to whom she refers as "the one you liked from that party." Because they were in different offices for those four years, the woman never interacted with my wife, which is the only reason my wife never found out how much the woman hates her.

I have two fears now that my wife and the woman will be in the same workspace every day: (1) that it will affect my wife's career negatively (her number one enemy is in power over her) and (2) that somehow my wife will find out what happened four years ago. Is now the best or worst possible time to come clean? Or is there anything I can do to prevent damage?

Carolyn Hax: Can I just say,

Wow.

I don't want all the responsibility for this one on me, so I'm urging everyone out there to weigh in if you have something constructive to say. But the only answer I can see here is that you tell your wife what happened. You can't send an unwitting victim into shark-infested waters, especially not when you're the only reason she's a victim in the first place.

Okay everyone, have at it.

Carolyn Hax: Mr. Somewhere, USA, your new nickname is "Chum."

At least I'm not that guy.

Seriously, William Carlos Williams?

When I was a senior in high school, my friend Greg (whom I called Gregor after Gregor Mendel) and I formulated a plan to defraud the Art world. He would be an "artist" and make pretentious abstract crap. I would be an art critic and bang the drum loudly for his work. We would split the proceeds of the sale of his work and on our deathbeds confess everything. The plan was inspired by our study of William Carlos Williams.

William Carlos Williams was an American poet and pediatrician born in New Jersey in 1883. He was involved in the early modernist movement in New York and was friends with many of its leaders, including Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Although he wrote many pieces, including novels, short stories, essays, and criticism, he is mostly known for his poems. These are what led us to hatch our plan. I am not suggesting that WCW was a swindler (my preferred job title). I'm just saying that as we sat in class listening to the dreaded Ms. Cho (she hated us) rhapsodize over his poetry, we came to the conclusion that he was either a genius or a total fraud.

Perhaps his most famous poem is "XXII, " more commonly referred to as "The Red Wheelbarrow":

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

See? That's a really lovely sentence. It's simple and almost terse but creates a practically tangible image and is beautiful to read aloud. It succeeds as an attempt to create an American image. It succeeds in breaking away from British stress patterns. Is it also "real, not just "realism," but reality itself?" I suppose the image is, so well done, you. Here's the part where I jump out of the boat: What exactly depends upon a little red wheelbarrow? What is this "so much" you refer to? The answer, my friends, is nothing. Nothing "depends upon a little red wheelbarrow." And that's why although I believe that WCW is a master of the English language, I ultimately think he's full of it. Read through his work, and you can project anything you want onto it. Is it sad? hopeful? forlorn? resolute? Who the hell knows?

However, if you can stop yourself from thinking about anything beyond the loveliness of his words and imagery, he's quite good. This is one of my favorites:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Maybe Read This Book: Inglorious

Inglorious, by Joanna Kavenna (I love love LOVE rhyming names, don't you?), is about Rosa Lane. When the book begins, Rosa, thrown by the recent death of her mother, resigns from her job. When she gets home, her partner of ten years, Liam, breaks up with her and very quickly gets engaged to her closest friend. Rosa then falls into a deep depression. With no job, no money, and nowhere to live, she sponges off friends whose sympathy quickly turns to disgust. Everyday she pretends that this will be the day she gets it together, and everyday she writes some variation of the following list:

Things to do, Monday
Get a job.
Wash your clothes.
Clean the kitchen.
Phone Liam and ask about the furniture.
Buy some tuna and spaghetti.
Go to the bank and beg for an extension--more money, more time to pay back the rest of your debt.
Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.
Read The Golden Bough, the Nag Hammadi gospels, the Upanishads, the Koran, The Bible, the Tao, the complete works of E.A. Wallis Budge.
Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhaur, Kierkegaarde, Nietzche, and the rest.
Hoover the living room.
Clean the toilet.
Distinguish the various philosophies of the way.
Clean the bath.

And everyday none of it gets done.

Joanna Kavenna (oh my gosh, I love the cadence of that name) wrote this book beautifully. The reader is inside Rosa's mind, and it's lyrical and poetic and biting and funny in a way that the standard depressive's mind is not. However, the reader is still inside a depressive's mind, and it is dark and close and oppressive. If you have never suffered clinical depression, this book will make you understand what it feels when you're trying to pull yourself out of the gutter of a disordered mind far better than any textbook. If you have been depressed, this book will be like a war flashback.

It took Herculean strength for me to finish this book; I dreaded opening it and felt claustrophobic while reading it. I have been Rosa. I have made that list in my head every morning and gone to sleep every night a failure. The first thing on my list was usually Put on Pants. Then, Get a job. Call your professors. Write Danny a check. Take out the trash. Clean up the sunflower seeds you spilled. Learn Portugese. Move to Brazil. Read the entire Western Canon. Write the Great American Novel. The thing is, and what the book brilliantly drives home, is that when you're depressed, everything on that list is equally likely. When you can barely get out of bed, taking out the trash is just as daunting a task as "distinguish[ing] the philosophies of the way." I was lucky; I had better friends and stronger support than Rosa did. I had enough people caring about me that one day I believed in myself enough to wake up and put on pants. I got healthier, little by little, inch by inch.

So should you read this book? Maybe. It's no fun, and it can be a hard slog through its two hundred odd pages. Rosa's woes are repetitive and unrelenting. But if you have friends or family members whose inability to just get over it and pull themselves together tries your patience, I think you should. It may help you realize that they would love to pick themselves up and dust themselves off, they just can't remember how.

Why Dear Abby Sucks

I have an obsession with advice columns. I read them voraciously. Carolyn Hax, Ask Amy, Annie's Mailbox, Dear Prudence, Dear Margo, Miss Manners, Classic Ann Landers, and Dear Abby. I try to hold off reading any for a few days or a week and then read them all at once in a massive advice binge. It was this habit of mine, of reading seven or eight columns at once, that first alerted me to the fact that Dear Abby is the worst advice columnist in the history of the world.

A little history, because the column hasn't always been this bad: The original "Abigail Van Buren" was Pauline Esther Friedman Philips, the identical twin sister of "Ann Landers," Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer, and they feuded for much of their adult lives over their warring columns. (There's a really good biopic starring Wendy Malik.) While Ann Landers was always the superior column, Dear Abby held her own quite nicely until 1995, when Pauline Philips was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and her daughter, Jeanne Philips, took over advice-giving duties.

The first thing you'll notice when you read a Dear Abby column immediately after, say, Ask Amy, is that Jeanne Philips is not a very good writer. If you read her column after you've read Miss Manners or Dear Prudence, you'll discover that she's not funny, even when she tries really hard. After a Carolyn Hax column, you'll realize that Dear Abby's counsel is superficial and trite, when not completely wrong-headed. This is the biggest problem. Her advice is really bad. Let's look at some recent examples:

To a young woman whose coworkers disrupted her reading in the break room:

Another thought: Place a Do Not Disturb sign with large lettering next to you if you think it will help them get the hint.

Really, Abby? Putting a sign up telling her friendly coworkers to leave her alone is going to foster a harmonious work environment? Good call. Or how about this one? A professional pianist is having difficulty. He plays in stores, restaurants, and lounges and his patrons often ask him questions midsong. Because he cannot play and talk at the same time, he has to either stop playing or ignore them until he finishes. What to do? Abby starts off with,

I have it on good authority, as well as personal experience in piano bars years ago, that many pianists can not only play and talk, but also play and sing.

You guys, Dear Abby is kind of a bitch. Maybe many pianists can, but this guy can't, and he's the one asking for help. Also, I think playing and singing is called self-accompaniment and is different than carrying on a conversation that has no relation to the music you're performing. This one's the worst in the last month. A woman sought counsel when the son she gave up for adoption in her youth found her. Her husband has threatened to leave her if she tells their adult children about this son or has any contact with him. Here's what Abby says:

From the tone of your letter your husband is the dominant partner in your marriage. If that's the case, and you really think he would leave you after all these years because you leveled with your children about the fact that they have a half-brother, then keep the secret.

However, if your relationship with your husband is anything approaching a partnership, then stand up for yourself and make it clear that you are the sum total of all your experiences -- both the joyful and the painful -- and you need to see your son, thank his family for the love and care they have given him, and let your adult children make up their own minds about whether they want to be contacted.

So if your husband is domineering, just keep your mouth shut, because it's better for you to lie to your children and ignore the son searching for his history than to be without your controlling spouse. Implicit in this advice is the idea that by marrying someone controlling she has given up the right to make her own choices. It also seems to say that her domineering husband is right to be ashamed of her and her past choices. The second paragraph--suggesting the exact opposite course of action, but only if her marriage is a partnership--makes clear that remaining silent and kowtowing to her husband's every whim for the rest of her life is her punishment for choosing such a poor mate. Apparently no one can change their circumstances or correct their mistakes in Abigail Van Buren's world. And that's a world I don't want to live in.

Torpor

Noun
Middle English, from Latin, from torpere
1a. a state of mental and motor inactivity with partial or total insensibility
2. APATHY, DULLNESS, LETHARGY

I have a few posts partially complete, but I just can't seem to make myself do anything these days. Maybe tomorrow.