India

There are 3 posts tagged India (this is page 1 of 1).

Marco Po-Snow

It’s President’s Day and it’s snowing like the Dickens.

I’m still sick, which is just glorious, and my symptoms have morphed into some kind of cold with all the sneezing and snot and coughing up all sorts of nastiness. I’ve also become like like an unlucky spouse in Law & Order, banging my head and face into door frames as I pass by.

I can see Sarah fielding questions at the grocery store from some overzealous security officer. “Excuse me, ma’am. How did your husband get that black eye?”

“He, uh, walked into a door.”

I don’t have a black eye, though. Just a bruised ego and a few drips of spilled coffee on my pants.

My reading presses on, though.

Marco Polo has gone to Japan and India and has stopped at all sorts of cities and villages in-between, but the real news today is how the pool game Marco Polo came into being. More specifically, why do players call out “Marco Polo” rather than, say, any other phrase in English?

There are a few possible answers, but my favorite is that Marco Polo had a reputation amongst sailors as someone who didn’t really know where he was going. So, sailors would play the game on their ships to pass the time — one player blindfolded and calling out, “Marco!” while the others hide and call back, “Polo!” How or why the game got moved into a swimming pool is anybody’s guess, but I do like the image of Marco Polo as some blind, bumbling Billy waist-deep in water calling out his own goddamned name in hopes of discovering where he ought to go.

This is somewhat backed up by Polo’s financial status, which wasn’t all that great, or, at least, wasn’t helped by his travels. He didn’t make all that much money as a merchant and he sure didn’t make much from publishing the tale of his travels. What wealth he had later in life was mostly owed to his being a respected name in Venetian society.

So, maybe he wasn’t that great of a merchant, but he sure was a great traveler. Or, maybe he was just at it for a really, really long time.

That’s probably all you need to get good at anything, really. Just keep at it.

I went to Dairy Queen and ordered a Robert Frosty

I got up early this morning to do my meditation and coffee routine, which is, essentially, just me using Headspace while I wait for coffee to finish brewing. One part of dealing with depression and anxiety is becoming aware that building habits is one of the best ways to combat that kind of illness. You’ve got to take regular, positive steps, and it’s good to get those habits to a point where, like brushing your teeth, they become something that you just do every day without thinking about it. It’s the thinking that gets you — think too much and you’ll think yourself into not doing.

So far, I’ve been pretty successful at meditating each morning at 5:00 am., which is not a thing I ever thought I’d be able to say.

People in my family have always settled into being obscenely early risers as they’ve aged. When I was young, I didn’t understand this phenomenon. At all. I watched my mother wake up every morning at 4:00 and thought, “Why on Earth would anyone choose to wake up at that time?” Especially in winter, when your bed is like a fortress set against the freezing darkness of a February morning, who is chomping at the bit to get up and leave the house? I thought people were nuts for making themselves get out of bed any earlier than they absolutely had to.

The mistake in my reasoning was thinking that my mother had a choice in the matter. I’m beginning to think that she, like me and my brothers, was driven by anxiety. I absolutely can’t lie in bed in the morning thinking about the upcoming day anymore — it drives me batty. I have to get up and do things because, well, the alternative is stewing in anxious juices waiting for my alarm to go off, all the while wondering, Why do I feel so bad? Why do I feel so bad? Why do I feel so bad?

I remember once in high school asking a good friend of mine, “How do some people wake up every morning full of energy and excited to tackle their day?” I’d seen it happen in movies and on TV, so I thought it must have been possible.

My friend, who was smarter than I, said, “I don’t think those people are real.”

My new Kindle Scribe arrived over the weekend. I’ve had a few days to play with it and, I’ve got to say, it is the best e-reader I’ve ever used. While I’m not a fan of Amazon as a company, I’m fairly invested in that ecosystem (I have quite a few Kindle and Audible books), and the Scribe was just about half the price of the other e-reader I was considering: the Remarkable.

The thing that I like about it — the reason that I upgraded from my Kindle Paperwhite — is the size of the screen. Most e-readers are just too small for my taste, but the Scribe has a 10.2 inch screen, which is about the size of a page in a hardcover book. A lot of people might not think it’s too important, and that’s fine, but I like to get an idea of paragraph size as I’m reading, and that’s hard to do if the screen isn’t big enough to hold several paragraphs.

I can see, for example, when I’m about to encounter one of Salman Rushdie’s convoluted wall-o-texts about the war in Kashmir before it happens. I can steel myself; I can be mentally prepared to misunderstand whole swaths of text.

I’ve made some leaping strides into Midnight’s Children since I got the new Kindle, and matters are not improving. I think I’m getting too caught up in the character-driven nature of this book. The whole thing just seems … aimless.

There’s this whole ham-handed metaphor in which the narrator’s congested nose somehow represents the struggle for communication between the different aspects of India after they gained independence. I don’t know if I’m supposed to find it funny or sad or what. Mostly, I’m just confused. There are so many characters that I don’t see the point of, too many events that don’t matter at all.

And the plot is so tied up in India’s history that you never get a sense of trajectory. Where is all this going? Does it so closely mirror India’s history that it is untraceable? Is Rushdie trying to make a point here, or is he doing a Robert Frosty have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too sort of thing?

I don’t know, but I am very much looking forward to being done with this book.

Resoundingly not bonbons

Yesterday, I, a full-grown man, made 32 chicken nuggies for dinner, and that’s it. No vegetables, no fruits, and barely any grains. Just processed chicken warmed up on a baking sheet.

I fell far short of my reading goal yesterday, too, getting through only four chapters of Ten Years in the Tub and one chapter of Midnight’s Children.

Mondays are by far the worst day of the week for me, and not just because I’m grumpy and/or emulating a lasagna-loving cartoon character. Mondays are just my longest day, when I’m at school for between 10 and 11 hours. Yesterday was also the first day of Spring semester, which means new seating charts, new lesson plans, and a handful of new students. I was physically sore when I got home, having easily met my 10,000 steps in the course of a normal day’s teaching.

“Is it my shoes? Is that the problem?”

By the time I got home and took care of a few other matters (contacting my university to register for online classes), I was ready to crawl into bed without supper, so I suppose I should be glad I managed to cook anything at all.

I don’t know how to make Mondays more manageable. I hear one of you shouting from the gallery, “Eat healthier and exercise!” but I’m pretending not to hear it. There’s also a proud mid-westerner deep in me saying, “Tough it out, sissy! Everybody works long hours,” but I’m also pretending not to hear that.

Because I’m a man and men refuse help.

Midnight’s Children is a reading like a stark counterpoint to Ten Years in the Tub. I believe I equated Nick Hornby’s articles to little bonbons of humor that I was stuffing my face with in my last post. Salman Rushdie’s book, by that metaphor, is a pretentious Michelin-star meal served by an unsmiling chef and a waiter who has a special single-tined fork that he wants you to use for the second course. “It’s a salmon reduction with carbonated orange foam served on a single sheet of Gandhi’s autobiography. To eat it, scratch out any conjunctions you see on the paper with your unifork, snort the orange foam, then give the salmon reduction a sensual kiss.”

Is it well written? Absolutely. But, resoundingly, it is not a bonbon.

I’m pretty sure the main character in Midnight’s Children is supposed to represent all of India. And WTF? Who is so full of themselves that they think they can capture one of the most populated countries in the world with a single character in a single book?

Salman Rushdie, that’s who!

Anyways. I’m going to need to read up on India’s history if I want to interact with the novel on a meaningful level, which is always a good sign. One should be forced to do some research to read a novel. I mean, it sure would suck if a book contained everything you needed to enjoy it between its covers!

This is overly harsh. Maybe I really am a Garfield.

I’m going to crawl under a blanket and ponder this.