Kalamazoo and waltzing and australopithecines, these are a few of my favorite things

According to my mother, my favorite word at age two was banister. Whenever going down stairs, I had to tell everyone that they had to hold on to the (big inhale to get ready for the word) banister.

A year later, having seen Anne of Green Gables several dozen times, my favorite word became chrysanthemum, mostly because I could spell it and no one else could. When my friends and I played school, I would give spelling tests that included words like cat, dog, no (I was also an expert speller of n-o n-a-p!), and, of course, chrysanthemum. It wasn't until I forced my sister to sit through the movie with me that someone else I knew finally figured out how to spell it. I didn't care that I hadn't the slightest idea what a chrysanthemum was, my ability to spell it clearly proved my superiority to other preschoolers.

There was a very long stretch of time in high school where my favorite words were Kalamazoo, willow, and waltz. My life got especially exciting every summer in high school when I'd go to Kalamazoo for an ice dance clinic, where I'd be working on dances like the Willow Waltz. And seriously, you need to cheer yourself up? Just say Kalamazoo once or twice, and you can't help but smile.

My favorite word since last fall has been australopithecine. I was required to learn all about australopithecines for my Anthropology class last fall, and about the only thing I remember is that australopithecine is really, really fun to say (it may or may not be the case that I remember nothing else because Karisa and I spent the entire semester doing sudoku, crossword puzzles, and making snide comments about how our professor knew nothing about linguistics).

Now comes the fun part: a linguistic analysis of favorite words! Feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you, for some odd reason, don't want a short linguistics class. Several of my favorite words were my favorites simply because they were long and unusual. Okay, banister isn't super long or super unusual, but pretend you're three. There, now it seems a little more long and unusual. Unless you're a gardener, you don't go around talking about chrysanthemums, and you'd have to be a very single-minded anthropologist to find a way to use australopithecine in a regular conversation.

The second category my favorite words fall into is that of words with letters that are perceived as being interesting. Kalamazoo and waltz both have z in it, and even though that phoneme (or sound) is really frequent in the English language (you say it in houses, dishes, lads, and really most of the plurals out there where the singular form ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant), I for some reason see the letter as being really exciting. As for willow, the consonants are either liquids (l) or glides (w). Not a single stop in the word! Very exciting stuff.

So, what's your favorite word? Is it your favorite because of what it means, or because of how it sounds? Anyone adventurous enough to do their own linguistic analysis of their favorite words?

Alice in Charge, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor OR The Joy of Being an Anxiety-Ridden Senior in HS

I was getting a bit slacker-y with my YA lit reviews following my move and subsequent removal from the best public library ever (or rather, one that's better than my home town's public library). However, I made a return to my genre of choice for this week's release of Alice in Charge, the latest in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Alice series. I've been reading these since fifth or sixth grade, and the last time I was this excited about the newest Alice book was when The Grooming of Alice came out when I was roughly twelve. After that, my tastes shifted to prefer the slightly more contemplative and reflective (and definitely more angsty) books by Sarah Dessen and Megan McCafferty. However, last summer I spent a week or so getting caught up on all the Alice books I'd missed, and I was hooked all over again.

I love the Alice books for the same reasons I love the Betsy-Tacy Series by Maud Hart Lovelace. They follow one main character and a close group of friends from a young age growing up, and as the characters get older, the writing styles get more complex and so do the issues addressed. This gives us a lot of time to see how the characters develop and change, and it also makes you feel like Betsy or Alice are your best friends, and that you've grown up with them, too. Both Betsy and Alice make mistakes, big ones, and that makes it even easier to imagine that you know them. Both series even share a weakness--they tend to be a bit didactic because of their protagonists' screwups. Of course, Betsy doesn't do nearly as much talking about sex as Alice does, and Alice doesn't worry about curling her hair or winning the Essay Contest each year, but they do both spend about 60% of their lives focusing on school dances, so it's really all the same.

Now moving on to this Alice book in particular. Naylor does an amazing job describing the absolute insanity of the first semester of senior year of high school, and she barely even talks about the stress of classes and homework. In fact, Naylor does such an amazing job getting this across that I started to feel anxious and like I should be doing homework just from reading it. From what I remember, this was what initially made me tire of the Alice books. I was plenty stressed enough in real life, so I didn't need to be stressed when I was reading for fun. I was all about escapism. And it appears I still am, only now that I'm no longer in school I'm looking to escape back to that chaos. Reading about Alice's college visits, her panic over leaving home, trying to do all her extracurricular activities so she'd look good when applying to college...it was enough to make me want to take a nap.

I do appreciate the number of controversial issues Naylor tackles; in this book it was racism and white supremacy. I think it's really good to discus these things in YA Lit, and I love that the book's message always advocates tolerance and open dialogue. In fact, Naylor doesn't even insist that the reader agree with Alice. Alice is so open to listening to other people's opinions that she doesn't isolate a reader who disagrees with her. That said, I worry at times that Naylor lets these issues take over the plot. It doesn't always feel like these issues are flowing out of the plot, but rather that they're forced so that Naylor can address the controversy. That's not a terrible thing, but it'd be nicer if there was a little more flow and it seemed more natural.

Honestly, that's my only real complaint. I do wish Naylor would write a little faster (there are three more books coming, but there's only going to be one published each year). Yes, she wants to write other stuff besides Alice books, but I'm looking at this from a purely selfish point of view, and I want to read the end of the series NOW (patience is not my strength, which is why I drove 15 miles yesterday to get to the closest store that had this book in stock).

And finally, I love Patrick Long. And he has red hair. If he and Alice don't end up together forever, the heart of my eleven-year old self will die all over again. Maybe real life couples don't work out, but honestly, fictional couples HAVE to work out. That's the point of fiction. The author can decide these things.

Dear Phyllis Reynolds Naylor,
Please consider the heart and soul of my eleven-year old self when writing the final Alice books. I need Patrick and Alice to end up together.
Regards, Katrine.

In Memory: Jamie Salé and David Pelletier

Wait, who are they? They died?

Sigh. No, my friends, Salé and Pelletier are alive still. It is rather the heart of my eleven-year old self which has sadly perished. Farewell, heart. When my biographers look back to discover the point at which my heart vanished and any ideals of true love were crushed, they will surely decide that this moment was the turning point (yes, I will have biographers, and yes, I still had a heart until this point. Hush, all of you, I'm in mourning).

Yesterday I was made aware of the fact that Jamie Salé and David Pelletier (otherwise known as the Canadian pairs team from the Olympics who may or may not have been robbed of the gold medal, depending on the state of mind of one Marie-Reine Le Gougne, although either way they were given a set of gold medals) had filed for divorce.

This was not news to me or to anyone else who follows the skating world closely. Rumors have been swirling for quite some time (with good reason, as it appears the couple separated 18 months ago), but particularly since the Olympics. That said, I was perfectly content to deny, deny, deny. The 11-year old inside of me couldn't bear the thought of an end to such a perfect union.

I first discovered the two at 1999 Skate America when they debuted their now-famous Love Story program (that link is to a performance of the same program from two years later--it doesn't have the raw energy the '99 Skate American performance had, but it'll do). It was quite the performance, and Jamie and David went on to have an almost dream season until they just barely missed the podium at the World Championships when Jamie had a meltdown on her side-by-side jumps. It was a downer ending to the season, but they rebounded the next year with an even better program (in my opinion) to Tristan & Isolde (link is to the best performance they had of it all season).

It was during the 2000-2001 season that I really and truly became a fan of the two, and it didn't hurt for my romantic middle school self that there were various articles confirming that they were a romantic item. These rumors had started the year before, but apparently I was too young then to pay as much attention as I do now to skating rumors. Maybe I had more of a life then. Regardless. A skating team? Who had skated to, not one, but two romantic pieces of music for their long programs? Who were young and charismatic and good looking? And even better, David had a French accent! Sa-woooon. Clearly there was nothing not to love about this team, and if David wasn't going to fall in love with me, then I guess it was okay that he fell in love with Jamie. They won the World Championships in 2001, and I squealed gleefully in front of my computer screen, as there wasn't live coverage of it in the US, so I was following along online.

I could tell you about everything that followed--the coaching changes, the Orchid program that they totally should not have dumped, and some rumored trouble in paradise at the 2002 Canadian Championships, but I'm pretty sure none of you care about that, so we'll skip to that whole Salt Lake City Olympic-sized fiasco in 2002. Overnight, my favorite skating team was suddenly all over the newspapers, getting interviewed right and left, and suddenly people decided to give them another gold medal. When they announced that they would be retiring from competitive skating shortly after all this, I was seriously bummed, and thus ended my brief love affair with Jamie and David.

I still, however, followed their pro skating. I met them when they came into town, and I even got to see them skate live (which I had been trying but failing to do for several years). They eventually got married and had a son, and though by then a more realistic 17 years old, I thought this was all the proof I needed that love was true and fate had a hand in everything and we would all live happily ever after.

Sigh.

It would appear that none of this is true, for the two have parted ways. What with the rumors of cheating on Dave's part, I can no longer even dream of falling in love with a blue-eyed, figure skating, hockey playing, French accented man. And thus, with this news, my 11-year old self dies.

I leave you all with a fluff piece from happier days.

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.