PSA: Bike safety

Taken from Voga.org

I am such a klutz.  No, really.  My mom told me yesterday she's nervous about me having kids, because at 27, I am just as accident-prone as I was twenty years ago.  *sigh*

On my way home from work, I took a wipeout on my bicycle.  In EPIC fashion.  I didn't know what happened, but I told the story to my dad (a really veteran biker) and he said I took the curb coming up my driveway at too sharp of an angle -- a rookie mistake.  This makes the wheels of the bike go sideways and fall down.  He says he still does it now, but it always irritates him, because he "should know better".  But he didn't chastise me.  I haven't ridden my bike seriously since I was 21, I guess that's enough of an excuse for him.

Anyway.  The damage.  I went down on my left side and got my left leg caught under the bike.  The first thing to hit the ground was my ribcage, which was about the most disgusting sensation I've had in awhile.  It felt like my ribs were made of Styrofoam peanuts.  I felt a weird crackling sensation.  Then I hit my head on the pavement.  THANK GOD, I was wearing a helmet.  The helmet cracked, which my dad says destroys the integrity of a helmet, so I have to get a new one.  David said later he could actually push the helmet into a concave position after it was over.  SWEET.

I got the wind knocked out of me and I tried to stand up, but I couldn't.  Fortunately a neighbor was sitting on his front porch across the street from us and saw it all happen.  He came over and asked if I needed help.  I managed to gasp out that I wanted my husband, and I lived in "that house", which still confused him.  But somehow he found David, who saw me and freaked.  That was when I realized that the leg that had been caught under the bike was skinned from ankle to knee, and there was a LOT of blood coming out of the knee.  Apparently knee cuts are like head wounds -- they're not very serious, but they bleed like MAD.  There were two rivers of blood coming down my leg.  I wanted to just mop up the blood and go inside but David was all "Hospital.  We're going to the ER now.  You might have broken your ribs."  They didn't feel broken at first but after I stood up they were DEFINITELY hurting, so David managed to get me into the car.  Another neighbor brought us a first aid kit and David used his EMT skills (he was so cute, taking charge of everything) to mop up the blood and bandage the knee.  Then we drove to the ER.  My mom and Christina called at about that moment and found out what happened, so they met us there.

The wait at the ER was predicted at 3 hours (so amazing), but it didn't take that long.  Mainly because I looked like a mess.  They gave me x-rays, and good news: no breaks, just some bad rib contusions and maybe small hairline fractures that the machine couldn't pick up, because I had injured my "floating ribs" (the ones that move when you breathe).  They gave me some Vicodin, and a very nice young man mopped the remaining blood off of my leg, put some Bacitracin on it (which made it feel fantastic), and then bandaged me up.  And I'm good to go.

I feel like complete crap this morning but very lucky -- I got off pretty easy.  I thank God that I was wearing that helmet.  I can't imagine what the damage would have been if I hadn't been wearing it.

Lesson, kids -- no matter how old you are, or how stupid you think it looks, always, always, ALWAYS wear a helmet.

Review: The Devil Wears Prada by Laura Weisberger

Sometimes, you just need a trashy chic lit book.  I usually abhor chick lit, but this was one of my favorites in college, and after finding it for 99 cents at GW, I had to give it another read to see if I still loved it as much as I did six years ago.

In Laura Weisberger's dishy The Devil Wears Prada, our heroine, Andrea Sachs, is a Jewish post-graduate trying to break into magazines when she scores the job "a million girls would die for" working as the junior administrative assistant to Runway magazine's editor-in-chief, Miranda Priestly.  Upon hearing the rumor that working one year for Miranda guarantees her lackeys their pick of positions at virtually any magazine they desire, Andrea decides she'll endure any sort of abuse and hand her life over to the tyrannical Miranda, in hopes that next year, she'll be working for The New Yorker.  What unfolds is a nightmarish tale of one horrible year working for the Boss from Hell, and the decision that Andrea must make between attaining the job of her dreams or becoming the sort of person she hates.

I loved this book when I was 20, a junior in college, and going through a rough breakup (during my aforementioned "summer of reading" after one of only two serious boyfriends I had before David broke my heart and I lost myself in reading anything that wasn't nailed down).  I thought that, seven years later, I'd love it just as much.  It's amazing how six years post-graduate and four years working as an office manager, secretary, and personal assistant all-in-one will do to change your outlook.

It's true.  Miranda is the boss from hell.  She's anal-retentive, demanding, rude, selfish, obsessive, and doesn't have a single thought to spare for anyone other than herself.  I am not excusing her behavior (or Anna Wintour's, since it's obvious that's who she is modeled after).  But Andrea's attitude throughout the book makes it impossible to identify or sympathize with her, let alone root for her.  I am sure that schlepping around NYC in freezing cold or rainy weather to grab lattes, dry cleaning, takeout lunch, etc. is a pain in the ass.  I wouldn't want to do it.  However, that is what a personal assistant does.  I am not saying that Andrea had to like enduring all sorts of verbal abuse and punishment at Miranda's hands.  But her whining, her complaining, and her attitude towards a job she felt she was much too good for, leaves me cold.  Also: this isn't prison.  Andrea was not sentenced to work in a labor camp for a year.  At the crux of the story, she could leave any time she wanted to.  She stays for purely self-interested reasons -- she wants the job at The New Yorker, she has to put in the time.  

(I have to add that this book came out before the Great Recession, and that today, there is no way that even working 10 years as a personal assistant is going to get you a job working at The New Yorker -- or any magazine -- no matter how "powerful" or "important" your boss is.)

After the book's great success, and its virtual skyrocket to the New York Times' bestseller list, an article was printed in the Times, exposing Prada for what it was: a thinly-veiled expose about its author's year working as an assistant for Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine. Kate Betts, who wrote the article in the Times, worked for Vogue and for Anna Wintour herself, and stated that Weisberger had apparently learned nothing in her one-year tenure with the "boss from hell", saying that she "had a ringside seat at one of the great editorial franchises in a business that exerts an enormous influence over women, but she seems to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure of the job her boss was doing, or what it might cost a person like Miranda Priestly to become a character like Miranda Priestly." (Betts, 2003)  Betts also begs the question, "if Andrea doesn't ever realize why she should care about Miranda Priestly, why should we care about Andrea, or prize the text for anything more than the cheap frisson of the context?"  Nicely put.

The book is fun when taken at face-value.  Finding out what it really is -- a tell-all, revenge book on an unfair boss -- really disappointed me.  And it doesn't make me any more sympathetic for the heroine.  Like I said, it's amazing what seven years and a little employment experience can do to change you.

Rating: ** and 1/2

Review: The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

I'm tearing through books as quickly as I pick them up, which is a nice change from the slow, tedious slog that was the past few months.  I'm also really enjoying contemporary literature more than I have in years.  Plus, the faster I read these, the sooner I can justify spending money to get more books, right?  Right.

Bernhard Schlink's The Reader is told in three parts from the POV of Michael Berg, a young man growing up in the tumultuous 1950s in post-war Germany.  Michael is fifteen years old when he becomes desperately ill en route to his home, and he is rescued by the kind help of station employee Hanna, a woman in her mid-thirties.  When Michael goes to Hanna's house to thank her for her assistance, the two begin a long, passionately obsessive love affair.  Then one day, Hanna disappears, without leaving a forwarding address.  Years later, while in college and taking a seminar on the legal system, Michael encounters Hanna again -- this time, while she's on trial for a terrible crime connected to the Holocaust.  As Michael watches the trial unfold, and witnesses Hanna's silence and refusal to defend herself, he begins to discover that there's a deeper secret that Hanna's been hiding -- from her legal team, from the prosecution, and from Michael himself.

This is one of those books where I thought I could predict the ending before even reading it.  I haven't seen the film adaptation that gave Kate Winslet her long-awaited Oscar, but after hearing enough about it, I figured I had the story adequately summed up.  Still, the way that the story unfolds sets you up, and when the ending that I was expecting did happen, I had already been lulled into a false sense of security, of thinking that I'd been wrong.  NOPE.  It hit me like a full-on slap in the face.

The story is sad, it's dark, and it can be slow at times, but that is in its nature.  Schlink is writing a story illustrating the general reaction of the German people to the Holocaust, years and years after it happened.  While Hanna struggles with what she has allegedly done, and Michael attempts to come to grips with his emotions regarding their defunct love affair, post-war Germany struggles with its identity.  How to react to a crime so large and unimaginable?  How to preserve your face as your reputation shreds itself at your feet?

Rating: ***

Review: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

I don't know how I managed to finish a book in between moving furniture into our new place, but I'm happy to say that we are finally "all moved in" and that the only (rather large) task left for us to do is unpack everything.  And find some living room furniture, but that's another story.  We have several wonderful friends who were willing to help us move in yesterday.  Exhausted today, I spent the majority of my Sunday resting, reading, and eating Asian food.  Perfect Sunday.  And somehow, I managed to finish book #27 for 2011 -- Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir Eat, Pray, Love.

When writer Elizabeth Gilbert finds herself sobbing on her bathroom floor in the middle of the night, overcome with the realization that she no longer wants to be married, she knows that she is missing something very fundamental in her life.  Upon concluding her very messy divorce, she takes a year-long trip around the world, spending three months each in Italy, India, and Indonesia -- the three I's, as she puts it -- to find God, seek enlightenment, and rediscover the joy in her life.

As a woman who has struggled with anxiety disorder and religious conviction for the past six years, I felt a kinship with Liz as she fought against her problems with opening up her consciousness and letting go of her guilt.  I found myself cheering for her as she learned to indulge herself again in Italy, to meditate and enlighten herself in India, and to flirt again in Bali.  Her whirlwind year of re-learning to express herself, and looking for God in all things, was really a treat to read.  I agree with a lot of reviewers on the Goodreads page, that the Italy chapter (the book is divided into three segments for the three countries she visits) is really the one that is the most forgettable -- India was my favorite part.  But still, good.  

My one complaint about the book is that the ending can read as a little trite and unbelievable.  I realize that it is Liz's life, and it did happen...it's just a little too predictable, you know?  (Or maybe you don't know, you'd have to read the whole thing to really relate).  Still, I enjoyed the book, and that's two memoirs in the past week finished.

Rating: ****

Friday post and GW scores!

I can't remember the last time I have blogged this consistently!  But it's been a good, albeit busy, week.  David and I are FINALLY moving the large furniture into our new place tomorrow, with the help of some amazing friends of ours who are willing to move us for the nominal fee of beer and pizza.  We've been moving things little by little the past week, and although we have MOST of the small stuff in our new place now, we have almost no furniture still.  Not after tomorrow!

Last night, my task was to bag up and get ready some things to donate to Goodwill.  I managed two bags and a box (and I have some more stuff to go today that I discovered later on), and so I packaged these up and took them over to GW...and treated myself to a trip around their book section again.  Why is it that whenever I donate to GW, I come out with more stuff?  But in my defense, I got an AMAZING deal!

(Forgive me once again for the terrible picture quality)

For all four of these, I paid...$3.67.  YES.  So can you blame me for buying them??  I think not.

The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink.  "As a 15-year-old boy in postwar Germany, Michael Berg had a passionate affair with a mysterious, guarded woman twice his age that ended suddenly when she disappeared. Years later, Michael sees her again -- when she is on trial for a terrible crime." (Goodreads)  I've wanted to read this since Kate Winslet won her Oscar for playing the female lead in the film based on it. 

The Devil Wears Prada, by Laura Weisberger.  I read this book summer before my senior year of college when I was drowning my heartbreak over being dumped in as many books as I could get my hands on.  It's not a great book, but it's fun, and I love it.  My sister stole my copy and I haven't seen in since 2008, so now I have another copy of my own.  For $.50.

Vanishing Acts, by Jodi Picoult.  "Delia Hopkins has led a charmed life. Raised in rural New Hampshire by her widowed father, Andrew, she now has a young daughter, a handsome fiance, and her own search-and-rescue bloodhound, which she uses to find missing persons. But as Delia plans her wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can't recall. And then a policeman knocks on her door, revealing a secret that changes the world as she knows it. In shock and confusion, Delia must sift through the truth - even when it jeopardizes her life and the lives of those she loves." (Goodreads)  I read Picoult's My Sister's Keeper (during that same ironic summer) and I loved it, but I've never read another book by her.  So I really couldn't pass this one up for a price as low as it was.

A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey.  Most of us are familiar with the controversy this book caused between James Frey and Oprah Winfrey, when news broke to the literary world that there was no proof behind some of the claims that Frey made in his so-called "memoir" about his stint in drug and alcohol rehab.  I know about it, but regardless, I want to read this book.  I started reading it after spending the night at a friend's house a few years ago (I had to put it down when she woke up) and I've wanted to finish it ever since.  So I nabbed it.

I doubt I'll get much reading done this weekend, but I'm hoping to finish the book I'm currently reading, and to unpack the rest of my collection!  I realized, after I went to GW and I was back at my old place packing up my books, that I don't have enough boxes.  I'd say I have too many books...but that's just ridiculous.  There's no such thing.

Review: Testimony by Anita Shreve

Moving really does wonders for my reading and nothing for my knitting.  I haven't picked up a knitted object in three weeks...but I'm tearing through my books.  All three of the books I picked up at Goodwill last Thursday are things of the past now.  And I've loved every single one of them.  I'm dropping off some donations at GW tonight, and you bet I'll be checking out the book section again.

Testimony, by Anita Shreve, reads like a Quentin Tarantino film.  When you begin the book, the main event has already occurred.  A Vermont prep school is at the center of a sex scandal that has spiraled out of control.  Worse still are the teenagers at the center of it -- three basketball players, one the quiet child of a local farmer, and an underage girl.  The story is told by the points of view of those involved -- the teenagers involved, their roommates, their parents, their teammates, and even the headmaster of the school, who has had his own part to play in the scandal that has torn the school, and the town of Avery, Vermont, into pieces.

As I stated in my Book-Related Pet Peeves post a few days ago, I'm not usually a fan of books where there are multiple first-person POVs.  But Anita Shreve does this masterfully, like Jodi Picoult in My Sister's Keeper.  I didn't have too much confusion with the characters.  The book also shows, not tells, the bleakness of the main characters following the events chronicled in Testimony, but in a surprising twist, not in the way I expected at all.

This is my first Anita Shreve book, but I plan on reading some of her other work in the future.  Definitely good contemporary literature.

Rating: ****

Review: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

As I wrote previously, my goal for my "100 Books in 2011" was to reach 25 books by the end of March.  I'm a few days late, but only six!  Technically five, because I finished my 25th book yesterday evening while David was at class.  Twenty-five percent down, seventy-five percent to go!  (When you put it that way, it doesn't seem like I'm too far done!)  And here I'll sum up my 25th book for 2011: Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt.

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

Francis "Frank" McCourt is an odd case.  Born in New York City in 1930 to Irish immigrants (a father from Northern Ireland and a mother from Limerick), he moves with his family back to Ireland following the unfortunate death of his baby sister, Margaret.  The McCourts are a sad, pitiable family, comprised of Frank's alcoholic father, his emotionally-fragile mother (the titular Angela), and his younger brothers, Malachy (named for his father), Oliver, and Eugene.  After being spurned by his paternal grandparents in Northern Ireland and rebuffed by his maternal grandmother's family, the McCourts finally settle in Angela's hometown of Limerick, in the hopes that their new life in Ireland will bring better fortune.

Good fortune is hard to come by, unfortunately.  Malachy McCourt Sr., Frank's father, is in and out of work, and spends what little he makes at the pubs.  Angela McCourt can hardly scrape the family by on her husband's meager earnings "on the dole" (the Irish term for welfare) and is forced to resort to begging at times to keep her children fed.  She is also constantly pregnant -- the family is ever-expanding, which only adds to their financial woes.  Frank finds what little solace he has in his Catholic religion, which runs every aspect of his life, and in school, where he discovers he is incredibly intelligent.  His one, all-encompassing dream is to finish school, get a job that pays a little money, and save enough to move back to America, what he and everyone else considers his homeland.  But over the years, Frank discovers that Ireland is more in his blood and soul than he ever imagined it would be.

Angela's Ashes has a reputation for being depressing, and is it ever.  I gave up on the hope that the McCourts would eventually have some good luck about a third of the way into the book.  But the rawness, the reality, is so complete, I could picture Frank's life in rainy, cold Limerick as easily as if I had been there myself watching it.  Rarely have I ever been so transported by a book.  

Frank's interesting penchant for not using quotation marks took some getting used to, but by the second chapter, I was acclimated and on my way to eating the book up.  My one complaint was that the ending came too soon, and left too many unanswered questions.  Frank McCourt wrote two sequels to his Pulitzer-prizewinning novel, 'Tis and Teacher Man, that apparently continue the story (and maybe answer some of those questions), so I may pick those up in the future.  On a whole, one of my favorite memoirs, and I will definitely be reading this again.

Rating: ****

Goodwill scores!

I took a trip to Goodwill this past week, to see if I could score any cheap furniture (I did not).  But the trip wasn't a total loss!  I managed to score a couple of great books from their bookshelves.  Apparently, a lot of people donate classics to Goodwill, when they're finished reading them (for school or otherwise), and I made out like a bandit.  Three books (one a hardcover) for $3.50!

The first was The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, which I already re-read and reviewed on Saturday.  The other two, I am in the process of reading for the first time.

Testimony, by Anita Shreve.  At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape. A Pandora's box of revelations, the tape triggers a chorus of voices--those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal--that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.  (Description from Goodreads)

I started reading this on Saturday morning.  It's good so far, although it unfortunately breaks my rule about "no more than one person's POV", which has gotten a bit confusing at times.  But so far, I like it.

Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt.  ...the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story.  Perhaps it is a story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner, and searching the pubs for his father, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.  (Description from Goodreads)

WOW.  People weren't lying when they said that Angela's Ashes was depressing.  I have to say, from the start, I got into this book quicker than Testimony, but it is hard to take at times.  Depressing, rough, and without hope...but incredibly raw and real.  If it keeps up at this rate, this could be one of my new favorites.

Did you score any good new books this weekend?

Review: The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

I'm coming to you today from our NEW APARTMENT!  We got cable in this morning, and in a little while my father's coming over with his truck to help me move the bed and other pertinent pieces of furniture, so we can spend the night here.  I am so ridiculously happy to finally be in the new place...well, as much as we are, which isn't much (we have a TV in here, and a cable hook-up, and our bathroom articles, and that's...about it).

I'm irritated with myself, that I never checked out the bookshelves at our local Goodwill before.  I scored three books (all bestsellers) the other night, for $3.50 (and one was hardcover)!  I'm definitely going to be doing that more often.  Cheap (practically free) books that I love?  Hell yes!  One of these is a re-read from high school, and I'll be reviewing it today.

The Joy Luck Club takes place in San Francisco in the late 20th century.  Four Chinese women, who all emigrated to the United States as young women, have formed friendships over the years and created what is called the "Joy Luck Club".  On evenings they meet, play mah jong, and tell stories, to laugh in the face of tragedy, to forget the unspeakable pain they've endured.  When one of their number passes away unexpectedly, the elder ladies of Joy Luck band together to help her misfit daughter, Jing-Mei (or "June"), return to China to realize her mother's long-cherished wish of being reunited with the twin daughters she was forced to leave behind.

The story is not Jing-Mei's and her mother Suyuan's though.  The book is not so much a novel as a series of sixteen vignettes, told from the points of view of each mother (Lindo, Ying-Ying, An-Mei, and Suyuan -- through Jing-Mei's eyes), and each daughter (Waverly, Lena, Rose, and of course Jing-Mei).  Their vignettes chronicle the ongoing struggles between mothers and daughters -- the mothers' desire to raise their daughters with proper Chinese pride, motivation, and respect, and the daughters' struggle to find their own identities, separate from their families and their heritage.

Amy Tan focuses on the Chinese heritage and family, but she might as well be writing about any mother-daughter relationship.  The crux of the message is always the same.  The daughter needs to fly.  The mother needs to hold.  The mother-daughter relationship is tenuous, heartbreaking, difficult, and precious.  This isn't Gilmore Girls; it's real life, within these pages.  The struggle between love and independence is a tale as old as history itself, and Amy Tan's work is beautifully real.

Rating: ****

Review: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Apologies to my (few) readers, but right now I've developed a wicked case of "re-read-itis", and I'm tearing through books I've read several times before.  Not that it will make any difference to you, really.  Maybe it's because we're moving and I'm falling back on the old, comfortable, and known.  Whatever the reason, this book (and the one I'm currently reading) are both well-read favorites.

For me, there are certain children's stories that never get old.  My favorite of these is The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  I read this for the first time when I was in fourth grade, and I can't count the number of times I've read it since.

The story of solemn little Mary Lennox, orphaned at 10 by a cholera plague in her homeland of India and sent to live with her widowed uncle on the moors of Yorkshire in England, has become a classic.  Mary is lonely, friendless, and disagreeable, and sees absolutely no benefit to her living in her uncle's lonely old manor until her cheeky maidservant, Martha, boots her out-of-doors to play.  During her walks about the grounds, Mary discovers an abandoned, walled-up garden -- the former property of her deceased Aunt Lilias -- and the buried key that unlocks it.  Within the walls, Mary realizes the joy of helping what has been abandoned and left to die, come back to life -- and in doing so, comes to life herself.

Frances Burnett is best-known for her tales of young children who persevere in difficult situations -- her other popular children's book, A Little Princess, focuses on the same theories of self-worth and belief in one's own personal "Magic" as The Secret Garden.  But Secret Garden is much gentler than Princess is.  While it still deals with the sensitive topics of parent death and abandonment,  the overwhelming message of The Secret Garden is the idea that the simplest, smallest things in life can help reawaken the beauty inside us all.  To a child, the story is as magical as a fairy tale...and for me, after 18 years, it's really no different.

Rating: *****