MY BOGGY BLOG: find your way through the murk

A Million Little Whatevers

Okay, so I did read it. You know, what everyone's talking about lately, James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" book that was sold as a memoir. I saw him on Oprah the on a repeat, talking about his book and Oprah gushing about how wonderful it was. It sounded interesting so I asked for and received it for Christmas. It sat in my To Read pile a little while, and then I picked it up and read a few chapters.... and *that's* when the Smoking Gun came out with their findings, questioning the validity of his memoir.

I seem to have a knack for timing in choosing my reading material. Last year, I just started reading Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons," a thriller set in Rome and concerning a fictional pope's death, just a week before Pope John Paul died. That was amazing, having real life and fiction synch up, getting rich descriptions of the setting and the rituals around the Vatican from the fiction just as I was getting a more factual presentation from the news.

And so, starting to read AMLP right when the controversy started up gave me a whole new understanding. I still wanted to read it, even more so perhaps, but now I was reading it in a more analytical fashion. I wasn't thinking "this is all a bunch of lies" but I was very aware that not everything had happened as he wrote it. I thought of it as a story "based on his experiences" with some truth and true experiences, but also a Story--- written as a Storyteller often embellishes a story to make it more exciting, more poignant, more dramatic.

The worst thing that James Frey did, in my mind, is that he used the term "memoir" without any explanations. He led everyone to believe that everything in this book happened as it was written, and he could have easily have written a Forward or Introduction to the book to let readers know that his memoir was based on real experiences in his life, but it wasn't factual. I'm thinking that this turned into a snowball that kept getting bigger and bigger--- first he was just out to get a book published, and hey, if calling it a memoir gets it published then go for it (he could have thought). Then it gets some attention, well, okay, do I now step up and say it's not 100 percent true? I'm making money, I'm getting some publicity, and now Oprah's endorsing it. Snowball getting bigger. Of course, it would have been so much better for him to come clean up front to Oprah, but he didn't. And now he's paying the price. But hey, in the scheme of things--- how big is this really? I'm a writer, and yeah, I get that we need to be aware and honest about what we are doing with our art, but...

WHY OH WHY AREN'T WE GIVING THIS KIIND OF SCRUTINY TO OUR OWN GOVERNMENT? OUR LYING PRESIDENT? THE WHITE MEN RUNNING EVERYTHING WHO TWIST THE WORDS TO SUIT THEIR OWN GAINS, AND THE RICH KEEP GETTING RICHER??!!

Ahem. Thanks for letting me get that out.

So hey, if you have any kind of interest in addictions and recovery, go ahead and read AMLP. It really was a fascinating book, a look into what goes on in recovery programs and in the minds of addicts. And it's written in such a unique style, an almost obsessive first person narrative that sometimes does without puncuation and grammar to give it the flavor of insanity. It's worth reading.

Young Drivers

So here's something I haven't had to deal with in quite this way before. Now that my twins are in high school and I've been driving them to school often in the morning, I am coming across teen drivers more often, too. These are students at the high school who can now drive themselves to school... kids who are 16, 17 or 18. It hasn't registered in my consciousness too much, but today it did. I was entering the parking lot to get my son to the drop off spot, following a red car. The car swung wide to the right and then made this abrupt and very wide u-turn in front of me. I stopped as he swung around, then honked and gave him a stern look when he glanced at me. I could tell that it hadn't even occurred to him that he had been doing anything wrong at all. I could have easily run into him as he swung around and cut me off. My 14 year old son cringed in embarrassment because I had honked, but I told him that this kid needed to know to pay better attention and watch out for other cars.

It is so scary to think of teens driving cars, and my own kids soon approaching the time when they will be driving. There are so many fine details to driving that just can't be explained by driving classes.... all these little things that come up that a kid with little experience might not know how to handle. And it's a very dangerous way to learn, just going off and driving on your own! It can take only a small mistake in judgment or action to make a very big accident.

I got my license when I was almost 17, and I became the designated driver for a few of my friends who didn't drive yet. I know I was silly and reckless, just because I was a kid, a teen. I wasn't purposefully reckless and I always was a very responsible kid, but sometimes even responsible teens just are goofy and reckless. And I think back to the time I was driving myself to work, during the first winter after I got my license. I meant to take a frontage road and accidentally got onto the freeway on a snowy slippery day. I was so afraid of freeways, especially merging onto one, and I sped up and skidded on the slick road and ended up in the ditch. I was so afraid. But mostly, it all happened because I was inexperienced.

I don't know what can be done about any of this. Kids can drive and they do drive. I can only teach mine to be the safest they can be and give them lots of supervised driving practice. And I'll probably be praying a lot as they drive off!

Why Oh Why?

I am asking myself this week why I keep on reading magazines? Especially any magazines that have beauty tips, exercise and diet info... most any kind of women's type of magazine really. I started reading magazines when I was about 12 years old, when mom and dad would take us kids visiting at different relatives houses on the weekends. A bored adolescent, I would go through the magazine stack that most homes had in their living room. I ate them up, with all their info and tips and advice and product identification. And you know, here I am almost 30 years later, still reading magazines with an eagerness as I flip through the pages. I really am (gullibly) poring over these articles looking for the "new thing," the right bit of info that is going to change my life some how, the perfect product, the right way of caring for my skin.

And you know what? It's never there. The information and advice and tips-- it's all basically the same! There is nothing new! I know the "right" way to put on eye shadow, and I have for 30 years! Only the products they are advertising are different.

Am I going to quit reading magazines? I don't know... I mean, I think I'm still susceptible to their allure, unfortunately. But awareness is the first step, right?

Bloggy New Year

Happy New Year! We are on this strange winter vacation schedule this year, which is making the holidays stretch out like pulled taffy. The kids in Minneapolis had school right up until Christmas, and so the break didn't officially begin until Dec 26. They won't go back until Jan 9, which seems a very long time from now! My parent perspective is "Xmas is over, New Year's is over, just get back to school!" But the vacation is stretching out before us for the next week... of course the kids love it!

I'm going to take my opportunity, then, to Do Stuff this week. Some stuff we have to do, like Dr. and dentist appointments and piano lessons, but I want to go to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts before they take down their holiday decorations, and the kids grumble and groan, but they really do enjoy looking at all the art, once I get them in the door! I want to take them swimming at the Y, where we haven't been using our memebership in quite awhile. It's harder to get the kids to the Y now that the older ones are 14, but I will make it mandatory... or else they can take leave of their prescious electronic equipment for awhile. Trust me, if I didn't make them get out and do stuff, they would literally sit in front of various computer/video/TV screens all day and never interact socially or smell fresh air.

And then there's movies. I'm on a movie kick lately--- last week I took them to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and it was great. DH and I went on an actual date and saw The Family Stone, and enjoyed that very much. It's always fun to see other families in action that are even more dysfunctional than our own! I saw Brokeback Mountain (awesome!) yesterday, and I know we will see King Kong this week, too. Yesterday, it was our annual day-long Watch All Three Lord of the Rings Extended DVDs with our friend D. who is crazy for the movies. We've done this about 3 times now, and while I do love the movies, I sure didn't mind sneaking out for a portion of the day to see Brokeback Mountain. I still saw a lot of LOR yesterday!

I wish to you all a Happy New Year (I almost wrote Nappy New Year, and considering how much sleep I got last night, that might work too!)!