HFN high-school romance

YA romances I’ve loved this year:

cover of I Believe in a Thing Called Love with smiling girl in miniskirt

I Believe in a Thing Called Love, by Maurene Goo

cover of When Dimple Met RIshi, closeup of smiling girl drinking iced coffee

When Dimple Met Rishi, by Sandhya Menon

cover of Always and Forever, Lara Jean, with girl at dressing table

Always and Forever, Lara Jean, by Jenny Han

(although actually, I liked the first book of the trilogy, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, best.)

I have to admit that from my middle-aged perspective I’m a little unsure how to read romances set in the senior year of high school or summer between high school and college. Maybe in general I’m not as practiced at HFN (happy for now) endings in romance as at HEA (happy ever after), but I think the books share my unsureness at least a little. Dimple and Rishi had some Meant To Be / Eternally cues and that was okay. Always and Forever framed it as “don’t let the world tell you your romance is doomed,” and… that worked as far as it went? But I keep having to stuff down my opinion that taking high-school romance to college usually doesn’t work out well. (Discussing I Believe in a Thing Called Love‘s solution would be spoilery.)

Miscellaneous notes: I Believe in a Thing Called Love has made me want to watch so, so many more K-dramas. (Not a high bar, Mystery Queen is the only one I’ve seen so far. I loved it.) And shooting has started for the movie version of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before!

Magpie

Not a lot of time on Tuesdays between school and picking up Sanguinity after work, so just a couple of links:

  • After I read Rahul Kanakia’s hilarious and unswerving YA novel Enter TItle Here, I started reading his blog. I’ve read this post three times: Some Advice to Writers on How to Search for the Heart of Longing. I like the connection he makes between a mundane-ish life and what makes you feel yearning and engagement as a reader. I also like its thinking-out-loud feel.
  • Lynda Barry has been linking to videos of the PS 22 Chorus on her class Tumblr. This morning’s was Coldplay’s Viva la Vida. I love how freely the kids sing and move. I would like to sing like that more.

ASL 101

Thanks to my union, I now have funding available for professional development! I combined it with the staff tuition benefit so I could take ASL 101 this term for no cash.

It’s been a few years since I was a student– my last class was calculus in 2014. It wasn’t until I was eating lunch before the first class session that I remembered there was probably a required textbook. Fortunately, college bookstores aren’t as mobbed during the first week as they used to be in the days before Amazon, and both staffing and books were plentiful.

Then when I got to class, the first thing the professor mentioned was D2L, the online system where the syllabus, assignments, and announcements live. Other people whipped out the syllabi they’d downloaded and printed, and I was like, oh yeah…D2L is a thing.

But in actual ASL skills, I have a bit of a head start– from finger-spelling as a kid, and from signing a little with Sanguinity when she was learning, and from combining signs and Chinuk wawa with the Where Are Your Keys method. So I understood the instructions to go to the online video ASL dictionary and learn five words a day that start with A in English, keep a list, and we’d teach each other in pairs during the next class. My partner did not catch the drift of this at all, and there was much confusion when we paired off Thursday and I was merrily signing and spelling, “Aquarium! Astronaut! Athlete!”

Since it is literally a 101 class, I’m not sure everyone gets that there’s a large component of teaching yourself between classes? (The book comes with DVDs for drills and mini-quizzes.) I suppose everything will be cleared up by and by. I’m not even sure I was supposed to stay on A words this whole week. But today I learned

  1. Anchor (ship, not news)
  2. Ancestor
  3. Ambulance
  4. Almost
  5. All

October Challenge

Holly in a full-length halter-top dress, from the back and seen in a 3-way mirror in a fitting room

I’m in a “500 Words a Day” group on FaceBook that’s pursuing what it says in the name, every day in October. Since I have a streak going on 750 Words already, I’m going for a blog post every day in October in addition. (Minus a few travel days later in the month, probably). They’ll be a lot fewer than 500 words a day, but I love everyday journal-blogs and miss the days when I had one.

Today I picked up my dress for a friend’s wedding. Sanguinity and I are both in the wedding party and needed a particular brand for purposes of matching color and fabric, so we went here, in Vancouver, Washington:strip mall storefront: Beyond the Veil bridal shop with arch at doorway and mannequins in window

In addition to its Pinkwater-worthy name, Beyond the Veil has a full size range of sample dresses! unlike the three Portland shops I called first. C’mon, people, fat bridesmaids are a legit customer base! Anyway, they rock and I am almost sorry that my trips to Beyond the Veil (three in all) are concluded.

Other things today:

  • petted a labradoodle puppy named Teddy, so young he can’t go on walks in public yet, who loved chewing Sanguinity’s braid
  • made a grocery run and ended up with an inordinate amount of food to tote to my office: gum, peanut butter, English muffins, chocolate
  • finished Bil Wright’s Sunday You Learn How to Box, which I think is the earliest YA novel about a black gay boy that I’ve found, even though the pub date is a late-feeling 2000. But the book is set in the late 1960s and has a feel of that era in its sparseness and dialogue– it reminded me a bit of It’s Like This, Cat. So many pay phones!

Now I’m going to go do laundry.

Monday Magpie: Iris Dement, Atul Gawande, cool art projects

Things I’ve liked recently on the internet:

  • Just today I started listening to Iris Dement. I was raised on country music and can’t believe I missed her entirely til now. This one made me tear up– I feel like I know several people just now who are feeling diminished, but who mean so much to the people who love them.
  • An interview with Atul Gawande by economist Tyler Cowen that’s not in the New Yorker, so maybe you missed it? Has sound (which I haven’t tested) and transcript. I liked this bit:

COWEN: Do you feel you’ve underachieved in life?

GAWANDE: That’s a hard question. [laughs] I know objectively that it’s kind of ridiculous that I would think I’ve underachieved, and that I’m proud of all the random things that I’ve been able to be part of. But I bear a kind of chronic dissatisfaction and sense that I’ve got much more to follow through on than I’ve managed to. So yeah, I think “underachieved” is the wrong word, and yet I don’t feel I’ve achieved nearly enough, and that half of what I’ve achieved, I wish I could go back and fix.

A Happy Series of Events

  • Shellynoir leaves Sang and me six tall IKEA bookcases when she moves to Brooklyn. They take up a whole wall of the living room. But
  • for several years they are mostly empty, because it is vexing to figure out how to attach them to the wall so they won’t kill us in an earthquake.
    • old-school lathe and plaster wall in which it is difficult to find studs
    • baseboard that keeps the shelves from standing quite flush with the wall. It doesn’t seem right to remove and saw up the baseboard for shelving if it’s not built-ins. But!
  • for my birthday, Sang Does The Thing!
    • buys boards to affix to the wall, solving the baseboard gap problem, and even paints them to match the wall, with paint the previous owner left behind for us in the basement in 1996
    • gets toggle bolts to fasten the boards to the wall, even though making 5/8″ holes in the plaster is unnerving
    • fastens the bookcases to the boards with L brackets.
  • We go to IKEA for a few extra shelves. And breakfast.

IKEA breakfast with eggs, sausage, pancakes, potatoes, and jam. Cup of coffee and juice box behind plate.

Two dollars! excluding coffee and elderflower drink.

Things that now have a designated place on the living room shelves:

  • current household files
  • shoe box of correspondence to be saved
  • my university library books
  • my TBR that are not library books
  • my borrowed-from-individuals books
  • footstool that Bookherd made
  • art supplies TBD – colored pencils and sketchpads?
  • picture books
  • OED, Oregon road atlas, Sunset Garden Book, Chinuk Wawa dictionary, and a few other reference books
  • the globe
  • comics
  • poetry
  • coffee table books
  • empty shelf for the kitty
  • Legos, Zoob, K’Nex
  • games
  • art and photos from friends
  • pop-up books
  • Sang’s research project books, mostly from university library
  • Sang’s Holmesiana
  • yoga mat, foam roller, rollout-stick

Now, in addition, the mostly-fiction in the other room won’t be so overstuffed, and shelving will be easier there too. I am very, very pleased.

signal

My morning walk commute sometimes takes me down Clinton Street, where at 19th Avenue there is a preschool and community garden before you get to the car-traffic diverters at 17th.

Twice a guerrilla crosswalk has been installed, pleasing the preschool families, and twice the City has removed it. So this was here on Monday:

painted mandala with bike and bee at SE 19th and Clinton in Portland OR

Seeing such a graceful solution– no liability for an unsanctioned crosswalk, yes painted reminder for drivers– made me feel hopeful all day.

piece of cake

shed decorated to look like birthday cake with sprinkles

My morning walk took me past this little wooden shed on campus. It wasn’t open for business, but the sign says it’s called “art is a piece of cake” and is an art thesis project by Daphne Lyda. Fill me in if you know what’s inside!