Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Ghosts of High School Past



When I think of English classes, I often think it’s a miracle that I still love reading. So many of the stories we read made me wish I could return to a state of illiteracy. But the thing about being literate is that you can’t go back – unless, of course, you crash a sled into a tree.

In elementary school we read inane stories out of reading textbooks and answered comprehension questions at the end (i.e. Why did the animals eat the pineapple?). They were written to educate us without causing us to enjoy ourselves too much. If it weren't for Harry Potter and the American Girls, I probably would have given up on reading and became an ignorant hooligan.

Some of the stories were intended to plant the seed of entrepreneurship in our impressionable young minds. One was a play about a young fellow who realizes that the price of toothpaste is too high, so he makes it from scratch with baking soda and peppermint oil. Other people also agree that toothpaste is too expensive, so they start buying jars of his homemade toothpaste. He turns his passion for cheap toothpaste into a toothpaste dynasty and becomes a millionaire.

I just thought to look up the story and it seems that it was a children’s book that must have been very loosely adapted for our workbooks. They cut out his female business partner, the lessons about gender, racism, and the true meaning of friendship, and the mathematical problems they must solve to become millionaires. It’s like they cut out all the potentially good parts from our textbook to focus on the logistics of making toothpaste.

One Amazon reviewer says this is the most important book he ever read. Well.

In high school, Ethan Frome was on our list of required reading. I feel like Edith Wharton personally ruined my life in a number of ways. She’s a woman writer and I want to like her because of that, but I resent that I had to sit through the mundane details of various miserable lives ending with a botched suicide. The title character and his love interest try to kill themselves by crashing a sled into a tree, but instead they just become horribly, horribly mangled. Sledicide is on par with leaping out a four story window or trying to overdose on children’s aspirin. Oh, Ethan and your half-brained schemes!

I reluctantly finished the book. Then I hurled it against the wall of my bedroom. If I have to pay a fine, so be it, I thought. I hate all these people.

One of the great things about life after school is that no one can make me read anything I don’t want to read. I was starting to get itchy about required reading at the end of college. In my last playwriting class, we were supposed to read plays and take an aspect of that play to write a scene. I mercilessly parodied the plays I didn’t like. As far as I’m concerned, a story that I think is awful only benefits me if I can make fun of it. My professor would ask, What did you think of this play? And I would say, I don’t like it. She would say, I don't care if you liked it, what did you learn?

Nothing! I learned nothing! I refuse to learn anything from this text, I cried indignantly. Then I stood up and flipped my desk.

Monday, February 25, 2013

Sushi

Dave’s Christmas present this year was an ultra-romantic sushi-making press called a Sushezi. If I were shopping for myself, I would have gone for the authentic bamboo mat and happily struggled with it, eating my broken rolls with pride. I probably would have also worn a kimono and had dreamy Travel Channel fantasies set in a rural village on the side of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I was, however, shopping for Dave and the Sushezi was the top rated result on Amazon for the keywords “sushi making kit.”  I put it in my cart.

And then, after much anticipation, we made sushi. We went to an Asian grocery store to pick up spicy pickled radish, cucumbers, and sushi rice. We got some pickled ginger and sesame seeds because details are important. Then we went to work.

Sushi stuffing.
We made a veggie roll for me and a Philadelphia roll for Dave. When I look at sushi at this stage of the process, I think sushi is not unlike a sandwich. Only it is infinitely better than a sandwich. That's why we've grafted it into our own cultural palate. The first American to eat sushi probably felt just like Marco Polo eating his first plate of pasta.


In the end, we had a bunch of very pretty looking rolls, and some awkward end bits that were eaten with fingers. Last week I insisted on making pierogi from scratch as well. I'm working my way through the continents.