Posts Tagged → Reading

Three dollars times five days a week times four weeks a month is sixty dollars times twelve months a year is seven hundred and twenty which it turns out is too much

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be “Put Together.” (As in, “Let me put myself together,” or, “That’s a guy who really has it all together.“) It’s a feeling that I like and I assume everyone else likes it, too. Otherwise, why would we all have dress shoes?

Anywho. When I think of being “Put Together,” I always think of Haruki Murakami.

Author of books like 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami has become a bit of a literary staple. I had a furious love affair with Haruki Murakami’s books in the 2010s, when I was in Korea and shopping at What the Book, which carried all his Vintage International Editions with covers by John Gall. (I read them all, collected all the different editions. I even had a few written in Japanese, which I couldn’t read but admired.)

I’m a Murakami nut.

Murakami has a few tropes that appear in his works, and one of them is the (usually male) character who loses his current life for one reason or another and is forced to rebuild his life from the ground up in a whole new setting.

Like, a guy has an existential crisis, gets dumped by his wife, leaves his house and job, and then moves out to the countryside where he works at a small-town library. Once placed in his new surroundings, Murakami describes how the character wakes up, how he cooks breakfast, how he gets to work, etc., etc. Murakami might describe the steps involved his getting dressed, how he unwinds after a long day, the restaurant he goes to for dinner, or the turn-by-turn route he takes in going home from work in the evening. All of it is so meticulous and minute and it just scratches some kind of itch that I have. I can’t get enough of it.

I think that itch I feel is the desire to be “Put Together.”

A few years ago, when I first started teaching at my current school, I was trying to set up a routine that would work for me. Sarah and I had just moved into the house we rent and things were … tough. We’d been overseas for so long, we didn’t have any furniture, knew hardly anybody in town, the pandemic had just happened, and both of us weren’t making very much money.

Things were decidedly not “Put Together.“

Back then, I thought I’d stop in the mornings at a gas station for a quick cup of coffee like I did back when I was student teaching, which was the last time I’d been a teacher in a U.S. classroom. It was a silly thing, but I liked stopping at a little place before the sun came up for a quick cuppa. I liked the silly little interactions I had with the gas station attendant. I liked walking into the school building with a warm paper cup in one hand and my entry badge in the other. I liked to take a little sip, smack my lips real loud, and go, “Aaahhh!” so it echoed down the hallways. Frivolous? Sure, but you’ve got to take pleasure in tiny, pointless, everyday activities. Otherwise what’s the point?

After a few days, though, I did the math, and I realized that I wasn’t making enough money to buy gas station coffee before work. With rent, utilities, gasoline, insurance, groceries … I just couldn’t afford to stop at a f*cking Casey’s for a bullshit cup of coffee every morning. And while having a gas station coffee isn’t necessarily a big part of being “Put Together,” it felt like I was trying to build for myself one of those minuscule Murakami habits only to be told, “Sorry, the coffee from our gas station is for better people than you.”

I’m still bitter about it. Dark and bitter. And aromatic!

Blogging about diseases is boring and sad but I need to remember these things so here we are

I haven’t been reading much. Well, I’m still reading a little, but I’m so preoccupied that in my off time I just veg out and either watch YouTube or TikTok. Still, I’ve gotten through Dungeon Crawler Carl and am currently working through the second book in the series, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario. I’m doing the print version and the audiobook (which is interestingly done).

The series is fine. I like the relative mindlessness of it. Blowing up goblins and punching monsters so hard they explode. There are some unique aspects to the plot structure that are worth examining on a serious level — I feel like the arc of the story is built to be understood from a macroscopic lens; characters will make more sense the more books you get into the story. It’s as if the author planned on writing hundreds of thousands of words and just thought, “We’ll get to it eventually.”

As a writer, I’m used to doing this stuff quickly — I’m borderline minimalist. “Get to it!” that’s my motto. Or, as Vonnegut puts it, “Start as close to the end as possible.” Don’t waste words; your readers’ time is valuable and you should use it well. Reading Carl reminds me how flexible these rules are, because there’s a lot of stuff I don’t get or simply wouldn’t do.

It’s unfathomable to me that we don’t have more information about Carl’s ex-girlfriend yet, even though you know she’s going to make an appearance (or be brought back up somehow.)

I’m also not a fan of giving readers actual numbers for strength and intelligence. This book will give each character a level and stats, all of which are explicitly told to readers. Is this why they’re calling it “LitRPG?” (Horrible, horrible name IMO. And maybe, overall, just a bad idea.)

Increases in ability should be shown through action not spreadsheets. The spreadsheets were only ever created for RPGs like D&D where you couldn’t easily show strength or intelligence through action. In a narrative, though, all we have is time to show how characters act. That’s the whole point of a story.

I will never read a sentence like, “My strength was at 30 so I was confident I could win the fight,” and think, “That’s some good writing!”

I know, I know, not everything needs to be literary. Besides my gripes at the LitRPG genre in general, Dungeon Crawler Carl has been fun so far.

Anywho.

My dad has a feeding tube installed in his stomach and is out of the hospital, but his condition doesn’t seem to be…improving, or at least not improving rapidly. While he’s glad to be home, he really doesn’t have a lot of energy. I don’t know if that’s from the cancer or if it’s from weeks of not being able to swallow due to the tumor in his esophagus (which is growing rapidly), but it isn’t a good sign.

Sarah, my brother, and I went down to visit yesterday. Dad was able to get up and move around, but not much. He can’t swallow anything at all and chews on ice like they have you do in the hospital. His headaches are getting bad. He has a big red bottle of hydrocodone you can inject in his feeding tube.

Radiation treatments start this Thursday and will continue for most of April. Chemo will start after that, depending on how the radiation goes.

A “home run” at this point isn’t a cure; a home run is shrinking the tumor in dad’s throat enough that he can swallow food. Not only will that make his quality of life much better, but being able to get more nutrition will be an added bonus. Dad loves eating and I hate thought of him missing out on food he enjoys in favor of the flavorless goop that goes right into his belly.

Time marches forward.

School continues. The ACTs are tomorrow and I get to proctor.

Sarcastic yay.