Above us only sky

I was really excited when the latest Maisie Dobbs book arrived for me at the library. But then snowshoeing and soccer and Jasper Fforde and Snowpocalypse 2012 took up a lot of my time. So I risked more overdue fines (snow-induced overdue fines, to boot!) to finish the book.

Each Maisie Dobbs book addresses some aspect of the Great War (cartographers, chemists, artists, disabled veterans). In A Lesson in Secrets, conscientious objectors take the stage. Maisie goes undercover for Special Branch, teaching philosophy at a college to determine whether or not political forces that do not have the interest of the Crown at heart are infiltrating Britain's institutions of learning. And of course, there's a murder that she has to solve that happens to be connected to her task.

Maisie as a character has definitely blossomed in the past few books; Jacqueline Winspear does a wonderful job at slowly developing our heroine's character. For much of the series, Maisie was serious and rather dour, held back by an inability to let go of her war trauma. But since both her wartime love and her lifelong mentor died in recent books, sad as those events were, it's as if our heroine finally has wings of her own to grow.

The next book is due out in March. I'm already on the waiting list at the library!

Virtual verisimilitude

Once again, Jasper Fforde managed to top his last creative achievement. As if the entire Thursday Next series weren't already a testament to ingenuity and imagination, the latest book adds one more meta-layer to the intersections of mind, text, and conceptions of reality.

The first five books star a kick-ass character named Thursday Next, who is able to both book-jump and time travel. She interacts with characters from books as well as people in the "real" word (an alternate-history version of Swindon, England).

One of Our Thursdays is Missing stars the written version of Thursday, a character in the books based on the "real" Thursday's adventures. The real Thursday has gone missing in the middle of a possible genre war, and the key to her whereabouts lies in various nefarious characters' attempts to control natural resources of unmined metaphor in the land of Fiction.

It's Jasper Fforde; it's automatically brilliant.

Reel diversions

I hadn't planned on seeing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but Thuter's text that Colin Firth is in it was enough to get me to the theater. I've never read Le Carre's book, but I think I saw the 1979 film version a long time ago. This latest was good; though at times it was rather slow, it was an old-fashioned Cold War spy thriller. (It's been a while since "defection" has been central to a film plot.) The costumes and set design were all admirably (sometimes disturbingly) spot-on for capturing the early 1970s in all its fashion "glory" and technological limitations.

I had to counter the heavy espionage subject matter with something light and fluffy, so a friend and I watched The Adventures of Tintin. I've never read the original comics, but I did read a great article in The Atlantic about how Spielberg handled some of the racist stereotypes from the original Tintin books.

I really liked Tintin. It was good fun, an whirlwind adventure story à la Indiana Jones and National Treasure: there's a pirate treasure, travel by air and sea, the Sahara, and a sheikh's palace. It provided a good counterbalance to Tinker!

...and beyond

Ammo, amas, amat

I forgot one rather important "first" from 2011...

• Going shooting at a gun range - It was definitely a cross-cultural experience. I didn't like the idea of shooting at a target that looked like a human, so my friend and I chose a zombie. My only other experience at a gun range was when my father took me and my sisters once, almost 20 years ago, because he thought we should be prepared for the Apocalypse (much like all the camping trips where we had to "rough it"). It's a pretty traumatic memory, so the fact that I went voluntarily as an adult was a huge step. My politics regarding guns and gun laws, probably due to that adolescent memory, remain the same. I know Mi Hermana and La Otra Hermana were equally as affected.
  

Many a weary foot

I love New Year's celebrations. I love the feeling of starting fresh, of a clean slate (haha, get it?), of the almost religious idea of starting anew with no sins. But I also love the idea of a progression, of time and life moving forward and amassing new experiences every day.

As longtime friends and readers know, I reflect on the past year by being thankful for and celebrating "firsts". And 2011 had a lot of firsts for me!

• Snowshoeing - I went several times and liked it so much that I bought myself snowshoes after Thanksgiving. Two trips already planned for January 2012.
  
  
• Baking more than I have, ever - I think I baked more in 2011 than I have the rest of my life combined. In the process, I discovered that it's relaxing and that I'm quite good at it!
  
  
• Visiting the Caribbean - Aside from the beautiful beaches and wonderful sailing weather in the British Virgin Islands and the amazing history of Puerto Rico, there were also many "firsts" for food from this trip: mofongo, plantain lasagna, conch ceviche, and Pusser's very excellent rum. Another "first" from the trip was the agonizing realization that I am either allergic (like Mi Hermana) to a sunscreen ingredient or (like La Otra Hermana) to the combination of sun and sweat.
  
  
• Getting help for anxiety and depression - It took 14 years. What college counselors failed to observe and subsequent MSW therapists failed to point out, both a psychiatrist and a psychologist saw immediately. I'm grateful to everyone who was so supportive in 2011: from driving me to that first appointment, to recommending certain doctors, to calling to see if I was okay when first starting the medication regiment, to checking in every now and then since. It might take a long time to work through, but I think 2012 will build on a lot of the foundation laid in 2011.
  
  
• Paddleboarding - This was the coolest accidental "first" ever - I thought I was going pedal-boating, which I've done before, and ended up trying something leisurely and fun.
  
  
• Being pulled over by a police officer - In 16 years of driving, I'd never been pulled over!
  
  
• Getting a traffic citation - In 16 years of speeding, I'd never gotten a ticket! Figures it'd happen in California...
  
  
• Climbing a rock wall - Turns out, I liked it! It was definitely scary at points, but I managed to coach myself through the paralysis and finish.
  
  
• Shopping on Black Friday ... on Thanksgiving - Mi Hermana and I have napped and gone shopping at 4am in the past, but this time we put the kiddos to bed, then drove to the outlet mall a little before midnight. When we got back to the house around 7am, we slept until 2pm. Living and learning... we might be too old for that now!
  
  
• Running multiple 5Ks - I beat my own record of 2 per year. I ran 5 in 2011!
  
  
• Driving a car onto the ferry - In 16 years of driving and 32 years of living in the Northwest, I've never 1) driven a car onto a ferry and 2) never done it alone. My God! The fare is exorbitant! But it was fun, since it was a first.
  

Here's to 2012, and all the new adventures it will bring!

Some corner of a foreign field

I didn't read the children's book, but I wanted to go see War Horse on Boxing Day. It reminded me a little of Black Beauty - the horse is sold form an English farm to the cavalry, and through the chaos of the battlefields drifts from the British to the German to the French to the Belgian sides, playing a different role in each. It's also a cute boy-and-his-horse tale (also not unlike many other animal stories).

Being a war movie as well as a children's book, you couldn't escape the fact that death and dying are everywhere - but I thought Spielberg did a tasteful job of showing the tragedy of war without getting an R rating: windmill arms block the execution of two teenage boys, a French girl's death is mentioned (but not described) only at the end, the riderless horse charging out of battle lets the viewer know the fate of the cavalry officer. In a way, it was more poignant and heartbreaking not to show how everyone who loved the horse met their ends. I'm not quite sure how the book pulled it off, though.

In the end, most stories about the Great War are anti-war. This one was no different: the Boer War regimental flag that both father and son took with them to their different battlefields signifies the silence of survival and the hope for an end to conflict.

And the scenes of the Devonshire countryside were also beautiful, even if a bit Gone With the Wind-like with the silhouettes against red skies.

What passing-bells for these?

After reading the light-hearted, Riviera-vacationing Lady Georgiana series again, it was back to the legacy of the Great War with Maisie Dobbs.

In Among the Mad, our psychologist-detective heroine works with Special Branch forces in a race to find a terrorist (though I'm not sure they had that term in 1931). With still-shell-shocked veterans being released onto the streets at the beginning of the Depression, someone intends to set off a gas bomb on New Year's Eve at St. Paul's. But, like the anthrax attacks 70 years later, the particular gas used as a warning is military-grade. It's a decent thriller, and sets up the reader for Maisie's involvement with Special Branch or other intelligence-gathering efforts later.

The Mapping of Love and Death actually had more significant character development and drama: Maisie's mentor dies, she strikes up a relationship with her old employer's son, her briefcase (a gift from her fellow servants when she went off to Cambridge, symbolizing her working-class, pre-war past) is stolen. The case at the center of the book is fascinating as well: the role of cartographers in World War I. The remains of a cartography unit listed as missing in 1916 are recently discovered, and an autopsy suggests an American mapmaker in the unit was murdered. One of the characters from the first book in the series also makes an appearance, making the plot ends come full circle. It's as if Jacqueline Winspear is collecting bits of the past in order to set readers up for an entirely new Maisie. I certainly hope so!

Counter rucking

We had to memorize "Invictus" back in seventh grade, and it's a fairly easy poem to keep in one's memory. So when the movie about South Africa's victory over New Zealand in the 2005 Rugby World Cup came out about a year ago, my curiosity was piqued. (My rugby-playing Kiwi bro-in-law also rushed out to see it.)

Since New Zealand won it this year - and I had some free time over Christmas break - I finally watched it. I do tend to like movies about sports teams: in the end, they're about working out differences and cooperating, which is why they also make such great parallel stories about nation-shaping and identity-forging.

But I'll admit, I was a little disappointed with Invictus. I wanted to love it, because the set-up was so great: a Nobel Peace Prize-wining man who spent 27 years in prison becomes president of a country struggling with racial strife and poverty and all the other legacies of apartheid, and an almost-all-white rugby team comes from behind to unite their divided country and win the World Cup. It's a great story. But for some reason, I found the characters to be pretty one-dimensional: Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela was always the wise Madiba and only seemed like an ordinary human in a few scenes, when his estrangement from his family is mentioned. Similarly, Matt Damon as the national rugby captain seems to just shuffle along - there's never any insight into his words or actions.

To me, the most compelling characters weren't the rugby team or the history-making President; the motley crew that made up Mandela's security detail were actually the most fascinating. Rugby was irrelevant to their transition from old guard to integrated unit, from pre-apartheid suspicions of each other to trusting each other as a cohort protecting the President. That was the story I was looking for in this movie, with rugby as the metaphor. Turns out, it didn't really need rugby to tell it.

No. 5

Having finished both of the Rhys Bowen mystery series I loved, I can now only wait for new books to come out. So I was ecstatic when, instead of reminding me I had overdue fines, the library notified me that Naughty in Nice was the fifth and newest book in the Lady Georgiana series.

Nice, as in the city in France. (I do love a good pun.)

Coco Chanel, a stolen royal necklace, and fabulous parties and yachts are all part of the plot. All of society are vacationing in Nice, where the Queen sends Georgie to discreetly steal back her favorite snuffbox from a rich kleptomaniac.

It was a good, fun, light read (as much as murder mysteries can be), especially after the heavy slavery double-whammy of March and Kindred.

It's also a bit fascinating to read the Lady Georgiana series at the same time as I'm reading the Maisie Dobbs series: both take place in the early 1930s, both heroines have one Cockney relative and one partying best friend, and both settings emphasize the Depression. But Georgie's world is all glamour and glitz and trying to hold on to the Roaring Twenties; Maisie's world is still emerging from the gray, silent horrors of the Great War. It's a sobering difference indeed.

As harsh as truth

Because I rifled through Mi Cunado's book collection while in Michigan, I ordered March from the library when I got home. Told from the point of view of the father in Little Women during his time away during the Civil War, it was an intriguing tale of idealism clashing with reality.

The protagonist was an incredibly naive abolitionist minister; for much of the book, he worked in Union-held territory teaching slaves how to read. His life story flashes back to his strong abolitionist past, his friendships with Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Brown. And as the eager Northern do-gooder encounters the real-world scenarios of his ideals, the reader too has to witness the horrors of both slavery and war.

I appreciated how Geraldine Brooks added more flair to snippets from Little Women. In this alternate telling, the March family were secretly all involved in the Underground Railroad. Marmee's temper - mentioned briefly in Alcott's classic because she tells Jo she learned to master it - takes center stage in many of the chapters (actually, it was a little scary how Marmee's temper in March reminded me of mine).

When I finished the book, I knew there was more to the story of the March family - and more to the story of the war, which would drag on for four more years. In Little Women, the characters on the home front are so removed and sheltered from the war that the story could be feasibly occur out of that historical context; for readers raised on Louisa May Alcott, March finally makes a tangible connection to it.

Back when I was read all of Connie Willis' books because she was a female sci-fi writer, I intended to also read Octavia Butler. I finally got around to reading Kindred, and by a total coincidence it had much the same subject matter as March.

An African-American woman in 1976 is repeatedly "called" back to the antebellum South by one of her ancestors, a slave owner. Without knowing when she'll go back and forth between time periods, she becomes more paranoid in the modern world as her encounters in the 19th century become increasingly violent. What starts as meeting her ancestor when he was a small child slowly turns into watching him learn cruelty and how to be the master of a plantation. Kindred is incredibly well-written; I had to read it in one sitting, into the wee hours of the morning, because I couldn't put it down.

The book ends so disturbingly and violently. With no neat resolution, the reader is left to wonder about the symbolism: is the America celebrating its bicentennial trying to reconcile with its past? Is the woman called back specifically because she's in an interracial marriage in the 1970s? The whole story is a jumble of emotions, but in ways that are more thought-provoking than merely shock-inducing.

A pulse in the eternal mind

I love the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. Now that I'm halfway through it, I'm starting to get sad that it will end soon.

Messenger of Truth takes our psychologist/detective heroine into the world of art, where she is commissioned to determine whether an artist's tragic death was accidental or connected to any of the controversial scenes he painted.

Parts of An Incomplete Revenge reminded me of "The Lottery" - the book takes Maisie to Kent to uncover the thoroughly dark tale of what one small, xenophobic town does during the War in the aftermath of a Zeppelin raid, as well as in the subsequent ten years during annual hop-picking season when Gypsies and Londoners camp in fields to help with the harvest. (It also reminded me that I've been meaning to read a comprehensive history of the Roma for a long time now.)

In these two books, the main character starts to shed her wartime burdens - a rift with her mentor forces her to be more independent; her wartime love, brain-dead for a decade, finally passes away, so she can no longer carry a torch for him; she starts to have hobbies that bring brightness and color into her life. And readers get to see Britain change with Maisie: slowly, book by book, telephones and electricity reach more homes; cars replace horses and carriages; rigid class distinctions fade.

Of course, the tragedy is that readers know that another war is looming 8 years on the horizon.

Roar!

Between all the reading I've been able to do lately, I also ran two 5K races within 10 days of each other, with a soccer playoff game sandwiched in between.

Aside from the Run for Your Rights, the Ann Arbor Turkey Trot is the only race I've run more than once - and I don't even live in Michigan! I like this new tradition, though I have no idea if Mi Hermana and the kiddos will even be in A2 next year for me to continue it; if Mi Cuñado finishes his dissertation and gets a teaching job elsewhere, they might move.

Mi Hermana the former cross-country runner bluntly informed me that what I've been counting as my watch time was actually my gun time, so I haven't been as slow as I thought. To keep it straight, I made a spreadsheet of all the races I've run in, with both times listed (thanks to Google caching, most records were still online). Fun spreadsheet-making! It was the closest to work that I got over the holidays.

When I returned home after a lovely Thanksgiving holiday meeting my newborn niece, my soccer team's had a playoff game, where I blocked a cannonball kick at point-blank range.
The bruise on my inner left thigh was a big as a soccer ball and shaped like one, too. (I thought it was really bad ass, and took a ton of pictures to show off my war wounds to La Madre, who told me they made me look like I'd been abused. Since the bruise hasn't gone away yet -- 9 days later -- I'm now paranoid about stares in the locker room at the gym.)

Then, with the fresh huge bruise, I ran the Girls on the Run 5K. Another fun race! I've realized I enjoy the family-friendly races where competition isn't the focus on the event.

When I entered my gun time and watch time on my newly-created spreadsheet, I realized I also seem to gravitate toward races that focus on women and girls or on women's rights issues (NARAL, BARCC, Iron Girl, Girls on the Run).

Hmmm.

O' both your houses

Because I couldn't stop talking about how wonderful Middlesex was, my bro-in-law said, "I have a few other Pulitzer Prize-winning books too, if you want to read those."

So I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the title of which naturally reminded me of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" ... in fact, it was strangely similar enough to the Hemingway short story, and yet different enough that I liked it.

The book moves back and forth between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, between three generations enduring their own hardships, and from the Trujillo dictatorship to teen angst. From the opening lines, the reader knows it's not an entirely happy tale: the idea of a family curse is introduced and reiterated throughout. References to "the final days" and "the end" are repeatedly mentioned, so it's pretty obvious that the characters are ill-fated. Themes of family, sex, and education each alternate as both nurturing and oppressive.

Most of the book drops Spanish phrases or Dominican slang, with no translation. There are footnotes for historical references. The narrator is hilariously snide and irreverent, relating the stories with a mix of multinational street slang. Each portrait of the cursed family is depicted with and bittersweet emotion. The cultural references are brilliantly and intricately mixed: everything from Dominican slang to comic book geekdom to 80s films to sci-fi lore. Through it all, the reader really did become part of the binational, bicultural, class-straddling, racially-polarized world of the main characters.

Then, on the plane ride back home, I realized I had one more library book to read. I no longer remember who recommended it to me, but 2030 was utter crap. The characters lacked depth, the plot read like a B-rated Hollywood movie, and the science, politics, and economics described (hell, the entire book) could have been written by a 12-year-old.

In a nutshell: the cure for cancer leads to prolonged lifespans in the U.S. Young people start to hate old people to the point that there are suicide bombs at AARP headquarters. When a mega-earthquake wipes out the city of Los Angeles, the government can't afford to rebuild because it's been bankrupted by Medicare. So the Chinese offer to rebuild the city for half of the net revenue produced forever after.

I'm not kidding. It was that bad. It was painful to read on two main levels: as a history major and as a politico-wonk. I had to suspend all knowledge of the political process, election campaigns, community organizing, infrastructure, and geology, among many other things.

But I was bored on a plane for 5 hours with nothing else to do. If I hadn't been trapped in the air sans sudoku or crossword, I would never have read the whole thing. Because in the back of my mind the entire time, I kept thinking that the book was written a few years too late to be relevant: #OccupyWallStreet has shown that young people can protest unfair policies in smart and nonviolent ways, we've been post-HCR for a while now, and the separate ideas of a living will and death with dignity were flashes in the news cycle pan during the Bush Administration. 2030 tried too hard to be a social commentary; in the end, it's too shallow to spark any kind of meaningful conversation.

Not a book to read after finishing a well-written, intelligent novel that won a Pulitzer.

But at least I have more books from the library to help me erase the memories of this one...

London to Grosse Point

The great thing about being on vacation is that, once the nieces and nephew zonk out around 8 or 8:30, I have plenty of time to read.

In the third Maisie Dobbs book, our heroine finally returns to France twelve years after her war injury. Two tough cases (both involving MIA soldiers from the Great War), coupled with her suppressed psychological trauma from the War itself, lead to a near-mental breakdown. (But, of course, she muddles through. As one does.) Two interesting developments for the series that I'll be curious to see in the next few books: that a breach of trust occurs between Maisie and her mentor, so she must start to learn to solve her most intellectually rigorous cases alone; and that since she finally returned to the now-graveyard scene of her greatest anguish, even after a decade she can hopefully start healing and moving on.

Books 4 and 5 are waiting for me at the library when I get back home.

But for now, one great thing about being on vacation in Michigan with a brother-in-law who teaches history is that there are tons of spare books in the basement. So I grabbed Middlesex, erroneously conflating it with both Atonement and March (also on the bookshelf).

Turns out, the books are very, very different. I haven't (yet) read the two I mentally confused with this one, but Middlesex is sheer, utter brilliance. Jeffrey Eugenides' novel about a hermaphrodite growing up in a changing Detroit is extremely well-written. The narrative voice pulls you in from the first couple of lines, hinting at intertwined family scandals and historical flashes and self-discovery spanning 70 years, all with teasing details that aren't fully revealed for several more chapters.

The book's genius is that it also draws on so much literary and historical richness: it starts on the slopes of Mount Olympus in 1922 and moves across violence and Depression to the streets of the Motor City. (Yes, I did feel like re-re-re-watching the Chrysler SuperBowl ad.) The protagonist's grandparents' flight from Smyrna also had me recalling the first vignette from Hemingway's In Our Time; and a chapter that involved the fledgling Nation of Islam had me running out to google-verify that it did, indeed, begin in Detroit. Storyline transitions in Middlesex flow from Old World to New, superstition to science, immigrant to assimilated, rags to (middle class) riches, rural to urban to suburban, east to west, parent to child, girl to boy... and the reader (at least this one) is left with an awe-inspiring, incredible, complex tapestry of overlapping identities, sexualities, and families.

Fear factor

I'd never seen Monsters, Inc. - but a post-turkey Thanksgiving stupor was as good a reason as any to watch it.

I thought it was clever, though I suspect much of it was too sophisticated for smaller children. (Monsters are deployed through doors in the monster world to scare kids in the human world. An energy company, Monsters, Inc., harvests children's screams as energy. One day a little toddler accidentally crosses the threshold to the monster world.)

Boo, the little girl, was adorable. And the ending was wonderfully environmentally positive: instead of relying on energy based on fear and the collection of children's screams, the monsters make a complete U-turn and change to energy consumption based on laughter and fun. I approve.

Dulce et decorum est...

On to the next mystery series featuring a smart female detective! The latest one I've found takes place in the aftermath of the Great War, so naturally it's right up my alley.

Maisie Dobbs makes her debut as a detective in the first book, which details the title character's story: a working-class girl with a keen intellect is given a chance to study and go to university; then World War I breaks out and she becomes a nurse on the frontlines. The reader learns of her story ten years later, when the immediate legacy of the Great War sets the backdrop for our new sleuth's first case. The book is a poignant tribute to the Lost Generation as well as a testament to survivors and strength to rebuild both personal lives and a more egalitarian postwar society.

In Birds of a Feather, Maisie is hired to find a missing heiress whose three friends have just been murdered (and white feathers left hidden at each crime scene). I must admit, the feathers were an immediate clue early on, and I guessed both the motive and the guilty party long before the final chapters revealed them. However, while that usually discourages me from continuing a series for very long, it seemed rather trivial in this one. I love the psychologist-as-detective aspect of the two Maisie Dobbs books I've read so far, I love the fact that the heroine is my age, and I love that the series takes place in my particular pet period of history.

But the real reason I'm drawn to this series is because the main character lives on the edges of identity: a working-class family and childhood erased from her future by a Cambridge education; a woman in a traditionally male profession; a nation desperately trying to forget the War to End All Wars while being constantly reminded of the incredible loss it suffered from it.

I've ordered the rest of the books from the library!

If I can make it there

It's always sad when a good series comes to an end. I've enjoyed Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy mystery books, and finally finished the last two.

In The Last Illusion, Molly goes undercover as Harry Houdini's assistant after several gruesome accidents during his shows. I was unaware that Houdini may have been a spy, but the book runs with that premise - Molly not only helps NYPD solve a few cases, but the Secret Service as well. What I did find particularly interesting were the descriptions of a few illusionists' secrets.

Bless the Bride ends the series with Molly's wedding to her NYPD captain (a dance which started with Book 1) . Before the nuptials, however, she gets in one last case: finding a runaway Chinese bride in Chinatown, in an era when the Chinese Exclusion Act prevented Chinese women from entering the U.S. I've always appreciated how each book in this series makes Molly interact with so many of the different communities that made up New York City circa 1902, and this one was no different. From settlement houses to "paper sons", I re-learned and re-lived a lot of lessons from my women's history and Asian American history classes!

And by complete coincidence, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution denouncing the Chinese Exclusion Act last month.

There aren't any more books in the Molly Murphy series, but I hope there will be more! Of course, I have half a dozen mystery series where I hope there will eventually be more books... Ah, well. On to the next!

La ville, la vie, la veille

I lovelovelove this video. The song is so beautiful too, no matter how slightly objectionable (and probably bad for me right now) the lyrics are.

But it's Paris, the eternal city for love, in a highly temporal world. I'm drawn to the bittersweet melody and the single-camera viewpoint that simultaneously moves forward but flashes back.

In unexpectedly related news, the #OccupyOakland protestors have managed to shut down the Port of Oakland. (How can a proud Seattleite not hear that and think of the 1919 General Strike?) Meanwhile, I have friends at #OccupySeattle, where earlier today SPD pepper sprayed some demonstrators.

It feels like the eve of something big, the proverbial crossroad where you choose to be a part of history or not. But then, maybe it's just the effect of the rain tonight.

May we live in interesting times, indeed.

If your colors were like my dreams

A friend of a friend was in "Year Zero" at a local theatre, so I went to see it. The play focuses on young Cambodian Americans growing up in Southern California and the legacy of the Killing Fields in their lives.

It's definitely a drama, but it's interspersed with many moments of comedy - which, I think, made it more real. Aside from the incredibly heavy topic of the Killing Fields, the play also addressed school bullying, gang members, prison terms, reincarnation, and the death of a parent. And amid all that, it managed to capture the funny and tender moments of sibling relationships, teenage angst, and old flames rekindled.

One of the central themes that struck me was the idea of running away in order to survive. Each character runs away from something (bullies, repressed memories, a gang war) - even going back to their parents who fled a genocidal regime. But they're also running toward a slightly more stable, if uncertain future: college, a new home, the promise of financial stability, or simply being alive.

It reminded me of high school, where second-generation peers from immigrant families faced a lot of the same push-and-pull waves of culture, memory, and dreams.

At one point in the play, two characters debate reincarnation and how they would like to be reborn: with absolutely no memories of their previous lives, or knowing and remembering everything from the past. In the end, their "Year Zero" is reset mid-stream - and the only choice they get is to decide whether or not to run towards rebirth.

It's a sobering thought, to think that survival can be so similar to reincarnation.

It's not right, but it's okay

About a year ago, I watched the Eminem/Rihanna "Love the Way You Lie" video. I'd heard the song everywhere - it was certainly a pretty enough tune, thought the lyrics were a questionable. So I googled to see the video. And then I watched in horror as I recognized parts of my own behavior and dependencies. In fact, I watched it about a dozen times in a row, not wanting to admit that I could relate emotionally to a song and video that, in effect, glorifies mutually abusive relationships.

Because Wehrenberg's book on anxiety management was somewhat useful, I decided to read her book on depression. And while some of the same issues I had with her other book are in this one as well, I've actually found most of the tips to be more helpful - especially the ones about getting out of cycles of negativity and despair and lashing out.

It's a very weird thing to stop feeling extreme emotions but not stop thinking them: for instance, pain manifesting itself as anger. Pre-meds, I'd get flushed and jittery and my heartbeat would pump up and I'd be thinking the stereotypical "Oh HELL NO" thoughts. But establishing a stabilized mood has eliminated those visceral reactions almost entirely, and what I'm still left with are the thoughts. And changing decades of the thought patterns about emotions is what I know I need to begin in order for an unhealthy cycle to stop. Despite great strides in the past year, there are still occasional lapses.

And there's still that damn laird's lug... the one that makes it seem like I'm invisible and watching my own life from a distance and can only watch helplessly as things fall apart and someone posing as me is complicit in it. But "hologram" is the only word I can find to describe the walls it seems like I'm trapped behind. It takes a lot of effort to realize they're not real, and that I can wrestle for control.

Light up, light up

Another day, another 5K - unlike last time, I didn't randomly sign up the evening before having to run 3.2 miles. This time, I'd also been playing in my soccer games and hadn't been drinking at weddings and birthdays for a week straight.

Luckily (though ironically), because I didn't drink beer at a friend's Oktoberfest birthday celebration the night before (though I did try to carbo-load on crackers), I did fine in the race and even beat my time from September. Didn't beat my personal record, though.

Next goal: to beat last year's Ann Arbor Turkey Trot time this year. It will be done!

Step around the heart of it

In the current mystery series I'm hooked on, the detective is an enterprising Irish immigrant in New York at the turn of the last century.

In Tell Me, Pretty Maiden, Molly Murphy is juggling five different cases - everything from an amnesiac woman to a haunted theatre - and of course most of them end up being connected in some way.

In previous books, real-life people (like President McKinley's assassin, the police Commissioner in 1901, and one of the first female NYPD officers) leap out of the pages of history and into Molly Murphy's world. In this one, Nellie Bly features prominently. (My grandparents gave me a biography of Nellie Bly for my twelfth birthday. I loved it.) And like Bly, Molly ends up going undercover in a women's mental institution to solve a case. She also jets down to Yale to dig up the truth about a missing student and joins the cast of a new risqué musical to find out who is the "ghost" scaring the performers in it.

In a Gilded Cage has less gallivanting around: Molly investigates several suspicious and sudden deaths during an influenza outbreak in the city. I guessed the identity of the murderer - that marks a first for me for any Rhys Bowen book. (I didn't, however, figure out the motive.)

The thing I love about this series is that there are so many different social movements and political undercurrents during this period in American history, and New York is a perfect melting pot for all of them. Each book has Molly encountering some new community or subculture; in Cage, it's the suffragist movement, as Molly joins a group of Vassar alumnae who march in support of votes for women.

I've already reserved the last two books in the set at the library - it's going to be so bittersweet when I've finished them! This series has been such a delight.

They don't love you like I love you

I found myself having to give a glowing introduction at a recent community screening for a documentary I hadn't yet seen. As it turns out, Gerrymandering was a good primer on the use and abuse of drawing political boundaries in America. It does a pretty fair job of pointing out that both Republicans and Democrats have redrawn political maps to their own advantage. And it did an equally fair job of pointing out that while gerrymandering has historically been a tool to break up and disenfranchise blocs of voters (African Americans, Latinos) or even individuals (challengers to incumbents), it has also been a good way to elect people that would otherwise never have a chance at winning in existing districts (African Americans in the South, for instance).

The film heavily favors independent commissions as the solution to creating a fair redistricting process: it lauds Iowa's existing (and extraordinarily geeky) process and tells the story of California's successful 2008 ballot measure.

And because I nerded out two years ago over the Washington State redistricting board game, I could barely contain myself at the screening when the film highlighted the USC Annenberg Center's online redistricting game.

In an effort to gerrymander (of sorts) my own brain, I read a book recommended by a friend. The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques had lots of great tips for breathing exercises and getting out of the mental ruts and agonizing, circular thought patterns that characterize anxiety. (On the other hand, it also had a lot of fairly unhelpful tips too.) And I appreciated the chapter on neurology that explains some of the basic science behind anxiety.

At some points, I started to have minor hyperventilation episodes just reading about some situations and realizing I exhibit some of the same mental loops and behavior patterns. In the end, though, I'm glad I read the book.

Even though the author (a practicing psychologist) favors management techniques independent of medication like SSRIs or SNRIs, I'm actually grateful for the drugs. I like the idea of "using your brain to change your brain" by overcoming destructive and debilitating thoughts caused (in part) by chemical imbalances, but I also understand how drugs work on the same neurotransmitters. With or without either techniques or prescriptions, or using a combination of both, managing anxiety so that it doesn't overcome you is still a difficult and sometimes exhausting challenge.

Leader of the pack

I loved Kathryn Miller Haines' Winter series, so when I saw that she had a new book out, I immediately reserved it at the library without knowing anything about it.

It didn't take long to realize that it was intended for young adults. The heroine is 15, for starters; and all the drama revolves around different cliques at school, staying out past curfew, and getting in trouble with parents who don't understand what it's like to be an almost-grown up in wartime NYC.

And, despite the title, it turns out it isn't a murder mystery. (The term "murder" is 1940s tween slang equivalent of "the bee's knees", which the reader learns almost 2/3 of the way through the book.) The story is about the disappearance of a high school kid from the Lower East Side, whose school the heroine just transferred to from her posh private school on the Upper East Side after her mother dies and her father is injured at Pearl Harbor. Her dad is private investigator hired to find the missing boy, but because he won't let her help him with his work, she goes ahead and does it anyway. Teenage drama, heartbreak, and rebellion ensue.

As a story about teenagers navigating their independence, it's not a bad book. It feels like it might become a series: a lot of the sub-plots aren't wrapped up, and a lot of tiny questions about characters aren't answered. As a mystery, though, there wasn't much to keep me reading. The end was a little anti-climactic, and the heroine doesn't really have anything to do with solving the case.

What the book did a good job of capturing, though, was that awkward in-between phase of the teenage years, where high school is its own social realm of mini-cultures and where adults just don't get how clueless they are about how capable and responsible teens can really be if they'd only be given opportunities to be independent. That adolescent mentality pervaded the book so naturally, it was brilliant.