You don't feel like going to work, either? Let's strike!

For a blog that has a French title, it is utterly appalling that I've yet to cover any French news. I shall now rectify that situation (and hopefully get back to updating regularly now that I've mostly unpacked from my latest move).

The French love to strike. No, seriously, they LOVE it. If even a little bit dissatisfied with the taste of their bread, they will take to the streets for a protest (a 'manif'). I once was waiting for a train in Antibes, and they announced that the train would be about four minutes late. I am a girl who took public transportation (in the States) to get high school for four years, so I've dealt with a lot worse than a four minute delay. Clearly the French didn't have my jaded opinion of public transit, because upon hearing this announcement, I heard sighs and grumbles and saw people shaking their heads. One woman started ranting to me about how this was intolerable. I managed to keep from laughing. Barely.

Thankfully, the train wasn't any later than the anticipated four minutes, or I'm pretty sure there would've been a manif on the spot. I don't even want to know what would've happened if any French had been stuck on the Amtrak train I was on that was delayed four hours. They would've stormed the conductor's office without a second thought (we Americans, however, simply stayed seated, whined, and only began to panic when the snack bar ran out of food).

Despite their distaste for inefficient transit, the French have no qualms about going on strike every day (or every other day, should they get rather tired of doing it every day) and making sure to take to the streets for every strike. These strikes will almost always shut down roads, so driving isn't an option (try to plan moving days for when there isn't a strike--trust me, I know). And it seems that anyone in the transportation sector will join anyone else on strike. In fact, the biggest problem with strikes in France is that they're never limited to just one sector. When the teachers go on strike, the students protest with them, and then their parents decide that a strike and a manif sound like way more fun than going to work that day, so they jump on the strike bandwagon.

As a result, I wasn't even a little bit shocked to read that a good percentage of France is on strike over the retirement age. It appears that Sarkozy (henceforth referred to as Sarko, since an eight-year old French child I met when abroad called him that, and I decided to pick it up) is discussing raising the retirement age to 61 or 62.

I know, I know. They killed off the 35-hour work week in France, they have between five and eight weeks of vacation a year, and now this?! Appalling, really.

So naturally, everyone has gone on strike. Government workers, oil workers, hospital workers, teachers, and, of course, transport workers (because the transportation sector will never, never, miss out on a strike). Even Nestle is joining in, which is reason enough to panic in my book (there's no chocolate being made! CRISIS! Just give them all anything they ask for! Hell, make the retirement age 49!). Because, really, a retirement age of anything above 60 is just inhumane.

Oh, France. Just when I start to worry that the world has gone complacent, you remind me that I have nothing to worry about. It's such a relief to know that while all sorts of crazy things are going on around the world, I can always count on France to be blessedly consistent. Once I move to France in September, I will be greve-ing to my heart's delight!

An Ode to the Good Skating Student

In honor of my last week as a figure skating coach at my current rink, I am going to take this opportunity to wax rhapsodic about The Good Skating Student. I considered whining and ranting about The Bad Skating Student, but that seemed to lack a little taste.

The Good Skating Student, first and foremost, loves to skate. This may seem like a silly thing to say, but when you consider the number of students who have to be cajoled, teased, bribed, or just plain dragged on to the ice (either by me or their parents), anyone who is delighted to step on the ice is automatically awesome. They don’t necessarily have to be naturally talented at skating, but they have to want to do it.

The Good Skating Student, in fact, loves skating so much that he or she will come in and practice on their own in between lessons. Frequently this student will be dragging the parents to the ice rink instead of the other way around (I was this type of student. My poor parents will never get back the years of their life they spent carting me too and from the rink until I got my license), and the parents are usually all too happy to complain to me that they can’t get their kid off this ice. In fact, a sure sign of a Good Skating Student can be found by looking at the student’s parents. Do they have bags and dark shadows under their eyes? If they do, it is a good sign that you have a Good Skating Student on your hands and that you should celebrate, no matter how sleep deprived the parents get (I sincerely hope that if I have children, they do not turn out to be Good Skating Students, because I want to sleep more than I let my parents sleep).

As a result of this incessant practicing, the Good Skating Student will tend to pick things up very quickly. This isn’t a necessary part of being the Good Skating Student, but it is a nice little bonus. However, this doesn’t guarantee that the Good Skating Student will master everything immediately. One of my Good Skating Students this session is struggling mightily with her scratch spin. And pretty much every Good Skating Student around will run into a bit of trouble with the axel. But let us not ruin this happy discussion of Good Skating Students with a subject as fraught with devastation as the axel.

The Good Skating Student also is capable of listening. The student’s ability to stand still for 1.8 seconds while the coach offers up a quick tip is especially appreciated. Even better, the Good Skating Student can actually apply the quick tip the coach has just offered! This makes the coach feel like they are actually, well, coaching, rather than standing around giving Shakespearean soliloquies on skating, only without an audience (and the audience is essential to the Shakespearean soliloquy, because anyone else who wandered around debating whether or not to run away for one’s master, à la Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, would be considered insane).

Due to the Good Skating Student’s excellent listening skills, said student is very on top of skating terminology. The Good Skating Student will never look at me like I’m a madwoman when I ask to see a right outside three turn. And after I ask to see that, the Good Skating Student will not promptly show me a left inside three turn. Or a right inside three turn. Or a mohawk. Or a pivot. I reiterate once more, I do not care if the student fails to complete a successful right outside three turn, but if they are on the right foot and the correct edge going into it, then I am a happy happy coach! Any extra awesome Good Skating Student will in fact remember the name of almost everything, and thus not require that the aging coach (with arthritis in several joints and really numb feet because the coach is too poor to buy a properly fitted pair of skates) demonstrate the same thing every single week. This is most likely the best thing about the Good Skating Student.

Finally, Good Skating Students makes sure that their skate laces are tied well and are not about to snap prior to competing so that they do have to stop halfway through and weep to get the pity of the judges. This is in poor form. They also do not get involved with significant others who will hire people to whack the knees of their competition. That is especially poor form.

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler OR How It's Done

I’m sure there were some of you who were disappointed that my review of Things You Either Hate or Love wasn't exactly overwhelmingly positive. Never fear! Those of you who wanted to read a book about an overweight girl named after a state that seceded from the union with family issues who likes to make lists whose best friend has geographically departed for a period of time, I have found another option for you! (Oh, and it’s the girl who has family issues, not the state that seceded from the union. This is an excellent example of ambiguity in language. Please take notes.)

This time our protagonist is Virginia, not Georgia. Virginia comes from a more or less perfect family, wherein she sees herself as the only blemish. Her older sister, Anaïs, is smart and athletic, and currently is off with the Peace Corps in Africa. Her brother, Byron, goes to Columbia and is handsome, popular, a star debater, and a straight-A student. Their mom, who is from Arkansas, has a Ph.D. in adolescent psychology. She used to be overweight, but now just works out obsessively and eats lettuce at every meal. Their dad is a software executive who “is the first to admit that he likes women skinny” (18). Oh, and the whole family can speak French fluently and they love artsy things. Virginia is pretty sure that she was a mistake. And probably was switched at birth, too.

Virginia is overweight, loves to read magazines and spend time online, obsessively follows pop culture, hates working out, and is not good at French. And, to top it all off, her best friend has moved to Seattle for the year for her parents’ work. She has a weekly makeout session (for more on the oddness of that term, see Karisa Tells All) with a boy named Froggy, but she doesn’t even consider him a friend. After all, according to the Fat Girl Code of Conduct (written by her), no fat girl should ever push a relationship with a guy, and she should overcompensate for her looks by going further than skinny girls. Virginia’s so convinced of her own inferiority that she’s sure everyone else sees it the same way. She doesn’t give people the chance to get to know her because she assumes they don’t want to.

Things start to fall apart when her old brother gets in some serious trouble, gets suspended from Columbia, and moves back home. Virginia struggles with readjusting her view of Byron, and she withdraws even further from her life. She deals with her emotions by eating, whether it's refusing to eat anything or eating everything she can find. She’s on the verge of self-harm, burning her finger on purpose and breaking her toe when she kicks a wall. But when her parents refuse to let her spend Thanksgiving with her best friend in Seattle, Virginia finally starts to take things into her own hands. She uses her own money to buy the plane tickets out there, and she finally starts to feel again.

She gets an eyebrow ring, and the most popular girl in school (who pukes her guts out between every meal) admires it, which is a bit of a wakeup call to Virginia. Her doctor, instead of telling her to worry about her weight, says that she might want to start kickboxing to get out her anger. She buys a dress she likes, and when her mom says it’s the wrong color for her hair, she dyes her hair the same color as the dress—purple. She starts a webzine at her school where students can vent about their lives, and invites Froggy (who had stopped speaking to her because she kept ignoring him) to join. She even faces the person whose life should’ve been ruined by Byron, and learns a thing or two about moving on. She writes a letter to her older sister telling her everything that’s gone wrong, even though her mother wants her to keep it all quiet. And finally, she tells her dad that her weight is none of his business.

After all of this, things with Froggy finally work out, but he insists on having a public relationship.

This, my friends. This is how it is done. You do not give your main character mono so that she can lose weight. You have her face her feelings, you have her face her problems, you have her start to work through things. Then, once she’s done that, she gets a boy. That’s fine. But her problems don’t magically go away, as they did for Georgia in Things You Either Hate Or Love. Instead, Virginia has to work through them. She has to tell people what’s bothering her. She has to stand up for herself. She has to do things on her own, break a few rules, break out of the box that she put herself into.

Oh, and if she references Ani DiFranco lyrics a few times along the way, that works, too.

Skating Student Quote of the Day: On Specificity

Student: Are those things on the things for the thingy?

The sad part is that I knew almost exactly what the student wanted to know. He was asking about the purpose of hard skate guards.

The first 60 books of the year

I made a goal this year to read at least 120 books. That was about 20 more than I read last year (yes, I keep track of these things because yes, I am a nerd), and it came out to 10 books a month, which seemed reasonable.

Much to my surprise, I’m about two months ahead of schedule, since I passed the halfway point this week—guess that’s what happens when one doesn’t have homework taking up 24 hours a day and then some. Since I’ll be leaving the country in September, it’s a good thing that I’m moving along so well—I’m not sure what my access to books in English is going to be after that point, but I suspect I’ll have limited choices. I’m also leaving behind my favorite public library in just a month, which is going to kill the number of new books I get each week. I don’t have the funds to buy ten new books every week, especially if they could turn out to be awful. I also definitely don’t have the space to keep them somewhere. One of these days I’ll take a picture of my bookshelf as proof.

Anyway, I figured I’d do a quick recap of books 1-60, all of were given scores from 0-5, 5 being the highest and indicating that said book is generally awesome.

First book: The Red Leather Diary, by Lily Koppel, 3.

30^th book: 10 Things I Hate About Me, by Randa Abdel-Fattah, 3.

60^th book: Beautiful, by Amy Reed, 1.

Books receiving the full 5 points: The Last Time I Was Me, by Cathy Lamb and Paper Wings, by Marly Swick.

Books receiving 0 points: Winter Love, Winter Wishes, by Jane Claypool Minter (this book was an example of the perilous dangers of picking up any book that has figure skating on its cover) and My Name is Sus5an Smitth. The 5 is Silent, by Louise Plummer.

Average score for the first 60 books: 2.25.

On Poetry: In which I am a bad English major

As a child, I was quite the poet. Or so I thought, anyway. I enjoyed poetry for several well-thought out reasons:

1) Poems were shorter than books, meaning I could have my parents read several of them to me before bed.
2) Poems frequently rhymed, making them easier to memorize than books (I was a late reader and preferred to memorize rather than to read).
3) Anne of Green Gables liked poetry. I was raised on Anne of Green Gables.

I had a copy of A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young, and I took it upon myself to memorize poems from it on a regular basis (I was particularly fond of Halfway Down). Starting in first grade, I saw talent shows as the perfect opportunity to display my ability to memorize poems. After all, Anne Shirley had given poetry recitations to thunderous applause at the White Sands Hotel in the 1985 Kevin Sullivan production of Anne of Green Gables, so why shouldn't I try to receive the same recognition?

Turns out elementary school children of the '90s just don't appreciate poetry the way everyone did in the movies.

Nevertheless, I maintained my loyalty to poetry and through the end of eighth grade, I was still memorizing poems for fun (as much fun as one can have, that is, mastering Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop for Death) and writing poems to get out all of my middle school angst. I think that every middle school student should be required to write several poems whenever they are feeling particularly emotional, if only so that they will have something to laugh at in ten years.

Unfortunately, poetry and I had a bit of a falling out when I started high school. Though I would still write some (terrible) poetry, I didn't like the whole concept of thwacking poems with a wet noodle in hopes of finding some meaning (I did like Introduction to Poetry as the poem itself seemed to discourage that type of analysis). I had a brief fling with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and I was always happy to flirt with The Highwayman and Lady of Shalott (mostly because, you guessed it, they were featured in Anne of Green Gables), but alas, it was not enough to repair my fraying relationship with poetry. Our split was tragically finalized in the latter half of high school, when I lost all patience with love sonnets that found it necessary to rhyme "love" with "prove." I exaggerate not: From the Passionate Shepherd to His Love.

Had I been a practical soul and decided to to study nursing, like my mother, or political science and economics, like my father, I could've gone on to live a perfectly happy existence without any further attention paid to poetry. Instead I decided to study English. I was able to avoid poetry-centric classes for the most part. I was not, however, able to avoid my guilt at being a bad English major. I was supposed to like poetry! If an English major couldn't appreciate it, then really, who could? Was there any hope for me?

It appeared, last fall, that there was. My philosophy professor introduced me to a fabulous poem by Mary Oliver, The Summer Day. The last two lines (where the speaker asks "What is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?") give me goosebumps. A breakthrough! I had found a poem not mentioned in Anne of Green Gables that I was fond of! Finally I could embrace poetry and be the outstanding English major I'd always known was hiding inside me somewhere.

This was the plan until last week. Last week I decided to read an entire book of Mary Oliver's poetry in order to boost my ego about how I read poetry for fun. This failed miserably. There was one poem, ONE, in the whole book that I did not find entirely useless. Plus all the poems were about gardens and woodland animals and clouds, and I'm a city girl. The keys to my heart are concrete and public transportation and sirens and skyscrapers.

It appears that poetry and I are not yet reconciled. Is there hope for me yet? Any poems I should be reading that will lead to my breakthrough? Any poems you particularly love or hate?

Willow, by Julia Hoban, OR Why Pay for Therapy When You Could Have a Boyfriend?

I want to hate this book. I really, really do. The fact that I don't hate it makes me seriously concerned.

Let’s start with the least problematic aspect: I really disliked Hoban’s (or her editor’s) comma usage. There were several points where the lack of commas interfered with clarity. I also spotted a few other errors like missing spaces, so she should get a better copy editor (I’ll go out on a limb and volunteer myself since I could use a job).

Working my way up from there, the next troubling aspect was the poor use of Shakespeare, particularly The Tempest. It’s used as a clumsy plot device, and it’s not done so by someone who understands it. Though not the biggest Shakespeare fan around, I do think that he had some fantastic plots and themes and (this is the big one) competing discourses. When we’re presented with The Tempest and told only that it’s “romantic,” that really discredits all the other themes running through the play. Even worse, Hoban doesn’t even entertain the possibility that Early Modern Drama might not have the same conception of romance that we have today (for those who are wondering, it doesn’t. Not even close).

Next problem, which is an extremely serious one from my point of view: gender roles! Guy (yes, the male love interest's name is Guy) only likes Macbeth because he’s male? Yikes. So much for the universality of literature. And it killed me to have to suffer through lines like “I hoped that there would be a time when I would need to…protect you like this” (299). Ugh. Male as protector and savior, that’s nothing new. (Aside on this quote: from my perspective, there are two ways of reading it. Either Guy is referring to having a condom as his way of protecting Willow—which, though a bit paternalistic, is good, since I’m all for safe sex—or he’s referring to the act of sex itself as protecting Willow from her cutting. Not a big fan of the second reading, but it seems to be the more likely of the two.) Unfortunately, Hoban’s choice to deal with cutting as a subject matter makes this even more problematic than other books (like Sarah Dessen’s) that frequently have a male as a savior figure.

This leads me to my next concern. Ultimately, Willow isn’t able to save herself—Guy has to save her from herself. Guy is responsible for keeping Willow from cutting, and he is also responsible for trying to make her stop. And in the resolution, it’s having sex with Guy that gives Willow the ability to stop cutting and work towards resolving her conflicts with her brother. I have no problems with sex in YA lit, and many authors pull it off wonderfully. Unfortunately, this novel never seems to address Willow’s sexuality. Instead, sex is simply another alternative to cutting, another way to feel, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want people thinking about sex like that. And in the end, Willow doesn’t need psychological help to deal with her cutting. She just needs a boy.

Despite all of the above, I liked the book. I didn’t realize it was written in third person until I was almost done with it, which shows how close Hoban is able to bring the reader to Willow. All of Willow’s emotions are strong and real and subtle, but clear.

Quite frankly, I’m even more concerned about the book because I did love it. If the characters were flat and uninspiring, if the plot wasn’t engaging, if we didn’t care about Willow—then there would be no danger in all of Hoban’s messages. We could dismiss the book as a whole. But since we can’t, we have to be sure that we make explicit the problematic assumptions Hoban makes about gender, sexuality, and mental illness. Because maybe a young 14-year old who’s cutting won’t be able to see how it’s problematic—she’ll just see that she needs to go have sex with a boy and then everything will be better.

This reads like a lit paper. Making explicit problematic assumptions? You can take the English major out of lit classes, but you can't take the lit classes out of the English major.