Yesterday I came down with some version of the plague, the main symptom of which involves an angry, rabid chipmunk taking up residence in my chest. Other symptoms include a sort of fever that makes me feel like my eyes are boiling in their sockets and the kind of pressure in my head that makes me wince when I cough.

It has not be pretty. But mostly because I can’t seem to stop crying about everything. To wit, a short list of things that have made me cry thus far today:

• The flashback on “Roseanne” where all the factory workers punched out in protest over something I cannot remember
• Darlene’s premature labor
• When Roseanne held her granddaughter for the first time
• When Darlene named her little baby who they didn’t think would make it
• When the scientist’s family had to go live in Mrs. Edward’s garage on “V”
• When the black doctor died on the original V
• When I tried to take a nap and couldn’t find any good book to read

Somewhere I dropped the habit. I think it stopped when I started living alone and didn’t have a noisy house full of sister or roommates to contend with.

A few weeks ago I had another bout of insomnia and decided to bring back this old habit to see if it would help. So far, it kind of has. My sleepytime playlist includes Ben Gibbard, Mike Doughty, and a bunch of other mellow love song type things.

Somehow, the songs have infected my dreams in a way that is hard to explain.

My favorite thus far is one where I was pregnant and decided to throw myself a baby shower. I had grand plans to serve 77 McDonald’s cheeseburgers to my guests. However, those plans were foiled when McDonald’s got all huffy with me trying to order 77 cheeseburgers at the drive-thru. It was at that point I told my mom and my sisters that I should probably make sure I was really pregnant before having the shower.

Yeah.

Andromeda Klein is a skinny, goofy-haired seventeen-year-old girl with disorganized collagen which causes her to have fragile bones and bad hearing. Because that’s not enough to make her a high school misfit, she’s also got a couple of wacky parents (Mom’s addicted to online role-playing games and Dad’s a conspiracy theorist) and is dealing with the death of her best friend, Daisy.

Also, Andromeda is a little obsessed with the occult and spends all her free time studying the dark arts, reading tarot cards, and worrying over a sort of boyfriend she calls St. Steve. Oh, and because she’s a high school student there are the requisite mean girls and frenemies who seem to alternately persecute Andromeda and be nice to her.

As a character, Andromeda is top notch. She’s smart and weird and not afraid to do what she wants. It’s a bit of a pity she’s stuck in this slow-moving tome named, aptly, Andromeda Klein.

Portman’s attention to the intricacies and details of occultism is both astounding and incredibly boring. He did is research, which is commendable, and Andromeda spends a lot of time doing her research and we get to read all about it. Over and over and over again. Which is a shame, because it really weighs down a book which would have been stellar if all the boring occult details didn’t get in the way.

I’m all for geeking out on a subject a character is interested in but you have to know when to say when.

After wading through all the dreams and the explanations of gematria and Agrippa and the proper pronunciation of Aleister Crowley’s name, there is a pretty decent story about a nerdy, bookish girl with a laughably over-protective mother learning to navigate the new social waters after losing her only friend.

At times Andromeda’s loneliness and awkwardness is nothing short of heartbreaking and at other times absolutely hilarious. It’s a testament to Portman’s writing that I didn’t toss this book aside during some of the slower parts. Because I loved King Dork so much, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I’m glad I did because even though the 37-year-old me found the book a bit draggy at times, the 15-year-old me who distinctly remembers sitting on the floor of Waldenbooks in the Northtown mall trying to decide which deck of tarot cards was the best loved the hell out of Andromeda Klein.

Want more Portman?
Read his Larghearted Boy Book Notes essay
Listen to the theme song to Andromeda Klein

The mere fact that the SciFi nerds have a day where they can “reclaim” books that belong in their genre totally proves Crackpot Theory #29 whereby I call SciFi nerds a defensive bunch of crybabies. Well, I don’t call them crybabies specifically in that post but I was thinking it.

My friend Wolfdogg and I just had this argument about the book Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.

“This is a straight up SciFi book,” Wolfdogg said. “But you won’t find it in the SciFi section at Borders. There are writers who’ve done this type of story better stuck in the SciFi section, where mainstream and hip readers won’t tread.”
“But you assume that’s the conceit of readers and the mainstream and not SciFi writers/readers themselves,” I said. “Whenever I meet a SciFi geek and say I like Vonnegut they tell me it’s not SciFi.”
“Well, it is,” he said. “About the best of it as well.”
“SciFi geeks get all touchy when you say certain things are SciFi when they don’t want them to be SciFi,” I said. “And a really good, well-written book transcends genre.”

We continued arguing forever and I said the words “conventions of the genre” about 68 times. Ultimately, I forced Wolfdogg to admit that he totally gets all touchy and defensive for loving SciFi, thus proving my theory and then proceeded to make fun of him for getting all snooty about how Speculative Fiction is the term for the stuff he really likes.

So here’s my advice: SciFi nerds stop being such crybabies. It’s your whining and defensiveness and cockamamie schemes that make the genre you love seem less than. Truly loving something regardless of how it’s viewed by the population is cool. It’s the ultimate in cool. Love what you love and stop making excuses. Except, if you love VH1 reality shows, that probably deserves some defense.

What is the jump rope capital of the world?
Bloomer, WI.

Who sang ‘you’ve abandoned me love don’t live here anymore?
Madonna

How do I lose my virginity to my sister?
You don’t. Unless, of course, you are Christopher Dollenganger and you’re being kept in a attic by your wanton mother and evil grandmother. In that case, if you have Internet access, alert the authorities.

Who is the woman singer on The Hold Steady’s Chillout Tent?
Elizabeth Elmore (Dave Pirner sings on the song too).

Will I get in trouble for using someone else’s poem?
Yes. Didn’t you ever see that episode where Blair plagiarizes that Emily Dickinson poem? Sheesh, does TV teach us nothing?

Why do they call it criss cross applesauce?
In this thread, there’s a reference to a rhyme dating back to the 60s or 70s:
Criss-cross applesauce
Pockets on the floor
Hands in your lap
And wiggle no more!

Back in the olden days (when I was kid) it was called Indian style, which is not so culturally sensitive.

Is Hemingway alive?
Ernest? No.

Did David Carr ever beat his girlfriend?
I think so. I can’t remember specifically, and in my review of The Night of the Gun I called him a woman beater, and I can’t imagine that I made that up.

I’ve grown leery of the essay anthology after the horrible experience I had reading Things I Would Have Learned in English 101 if I Hadn’t Skipped Class to Have Sex, I mean, Things I Learned from the Women Who Dumped Me. The book was so awful and cliched that I feared I had be scarred for life.

Then I kept reading about Love is a Four-Letter Word, subtitled True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts, edited by Michael Taeckens. It worried me and then I saw that the introduction was by Neal Pollack, and made me even more worried. But ultimately I was won over by the author list — Junot Diaz, Kate Christensen, Dan Kennedy, and Said Saytafiezadeh.

Thank god I put my fears aside and dove in. This was fun.

When writing about love and heartbreak there’s a tendency to the maudlin, to the woe-is-me, to the “this is the worst thing to ever happened.” But there wasn’t a lot of that in this anthology. Instead most of the artists approached their heartbreaks from an area of remove, with wizened eyes because they knew they had survived. As a reader, I really appreciated it. As a writer, I think it was quite brave. It’s hard to admit our romantic failures and the stupid, stupid things we do for love, even though we all do it.

What surprised me the most about this collection is that the writers who drew me to it were, kind of disappointing. Instead I discovered brand-new writers — Maud Newton, Jami Attenberg, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Amanda Stern, Margaret Sartor– who charmed me, made me eager to seek out their other work.

I especially liked Jami Attenberg’s essay “The Story You Will Tell” for purely egotistical reasons. See:

He say’s it’s amazing that he loves not having to talk to anyone. You understand completely. This was one of the reasons why you liked him. Because he understood why not having to talk to anyone was a good thing. (pg 177)

He doesn’t call or e-mail. But it’s okay. You are already turning it into a story in your head, that time I made out with my ex-boyfriend. Because this is what you do, you turn things into stories, and then it’s okay. You don’t need to be in a relationship. You are already in a relationship with yourself. You are going to love yourself forever. It is a little bit sick, but it is a little bit healthy too. And you never not call. (pg 179)

The same can probably be said about Michael Taeckens’ piece (incidentally, he chose The Smiths in the Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the authors included in this book).

I had been confusing beauty and sadness for a long time, apparently. My belief that that they were intertwined was like a double helix in my genetic code. And perhaps the sadness and beauty were mixed up with the masochism too. Emily Dickinson was my favorite poet. (Funerals! Flies buzzing!) Ingmar Bergman was my favorite film director. (Death! Schizophrenia!) The Smiths was my favorite band. (You don’t even know I exist, but I love you!) Even as early as age fourteen, my predilection for the maudlin made itself known — the theme song I chose for my relationship with my girlfriend was Chicago’s “Hard to Say I’m Sorry/Get Away”: Even lovers need a holiday far away from each other. The song just seemed so romantic. (pg 130)

The collection is so overwhelmingly solid that I won’t mention the big, dull duds (*cough*Gary Shteyngart*cough*), and just give it a hearty recommendation.

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that makes this class so fucking awesome, because I want every class I take at the Loft to be this class.

Part of the magical chemistry is the sassiness. This class is not afraid to speak its mind, and even when they’re wrong (as in when they don’t agree with me) they don’t mind proclaiming their wrongness, sticking to that wrongness, and defending it to a degree where I start to think maybe they weren’t so wrong in the first place.

Take last night, for instance. We were workshopping a piece that kind of blew convention out of the water. None of the characters had names and the POV was a little slippy and slidey. There was a lot of debate about what exactly was going on, especially at the end of the story where it could be read that the female character who had some terminal illness was going to off herself or she was steeling her resolve to fight the disease.

There were two camps. Team Life (my team) who were wholly convinced she was going to fight the disease, and Team Death (Steve’s team) who were convinced she was going to kill herself because she was done fighting.

At one point Steve mentioned a cryptic phone call that had happened earlier in the story. He said he interpreted it as the female character calling some sort of assisted suicide hotline.

I’m sure the lightbulb that went on over my head was blinding. I love when that happens. When someone opens your eyes to something you’d never seen before.

This has happened a few times in this class, because my classmates are so smart. At least most of them are. There’s a few people that I’d like to punch in the throat, and each time I walk out of the classroom having not beaten or maimed anyone I give myself a mental high five for showing such restraint.

But I think you need that too, to make a class good. Creativity thrives on tension and when you all have the same point of view and see things the same way, conversation kind of dies.

It is so so so awesome. I wish everyone could watch from a window to see how fun and vibrant and loud a workshop can be. It’s so great to be able to spend two hours a week talking about and arguing about literature with smart people.

Well, he is, and it has turned him from just a theologian into this new agey sort of mystic spiritualist guy who really enjoys football. He always enjoyed football. It’s just one of those weird tidbits that doesn’t seem to match the rest of his vocation.

I’m really enjoying his studies or at least what he discusses about his studies. It appeals to the supersecret, teeny-tiny inner-hippie I keep buried deep down underneath all my many layers of jaded cynicism and bittersweetheartness. I blame the hippiness on my mom and that one year in the 90s where I wore a lot of tie-dye.

Hippies in general kind of give me the oogies. I’m not a free love, love me, say hell yes, mother Earth, and all tht jazz kid of gal. In fact, I rather enjoy picking on dirty hippies.

But wait, this isn’t about the contradictions inherent in my personality. No, this is about how Ben has been teaching us to pay attention to the what’s going on around us and to let go of the bullshit. For the record, I am way better at this so far than Sister #2, and I can say that because she doesn’t read I Will Dare unless I tell her she can. Well, and she spends a lot of time working on a domestic violence research project which makes it hard to let go of anything. So I guess she gets a pass.

Anyway, because of this new knowledge, instead of writing a thinly-veiled, passive-aggressive cryptoblog bitching about how just because I don’t have kids or husband or go to an office from 9-5 it doesn’t mean that I’m sitting around with my bonbons thinking about the bullshit going on in other people’s lives and judging them harshly because of it.

No, instead I am writing a lovely post about how I’m learning to let the bullshit go and celebrate the positive. I’m celebrating a day filled with just enough work to make me feel like a productive member of society, a day with homemade soup and crusty breadsticks, a day with my favorite rerun of The Office ever, and a night that will be filled with a good book and maybe some homework.

That’s what we call enlightenment, yo.

Today, I got nothing. Why? Because saying something would require to me to stop thinking about Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, which is something I’m just not willing to do at this juncture. I’m wholly obsessed with the novel and I’ve still got 132 pages to go. I’m the kind of obsessed with the novel where nearing the end scares me. It will either push me over the edge into orgasmic delight that brings on nextbookaphobia or it will send me crashing down to Earth angry and depressed.

I’ve become so obsessed that I’m resentful of everything that takes me away from the book — eating, sleeping, working, moving this giant cabinet from my parents’ apartment into my garage. I hope I can finish it tonight lest I kill someone tomorrow in my book-deprived rage.