A 'fine' mess

Good morning, and how is everybody doing on this Hump Day? I'm fine, thanks for asking. No, really, I'm not just saying that. Often people say "fine" when in actuality they aren't fine but don't want to get into it. I truly mean that I'm fine though. (Uh oh, I smell a tangent coming and I apologize. I really wasn't planning on this, but sometimes I go a little crazy. I don't think I can blame this one on my wife's vacation either.)

I just reminded myself of a line from A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. In it, a character says that something is "fine," and the other character goes off on how "fine" is "a woman's word." This led to a surprisingly heated debate in one of my literature classes as to whether "fine" was indeed a word that women use much more often to avoid a question and move on. I didn't speak up much, because while I use that word, I don't like speaking as if I represent all men. It was a stupid discussion that went on for way too long, and now I've brought it to you. Hope you enjoyed.

Even though I read the book, I only really remember a few things about it. The rest I'm piecing together from scenes they showed in the preview for the movie version. I keep picturing Jason Robards yelling, "It's these girls who are making me crazy!" The only other thing I really recall is the last line of the book because it pissed me off. "This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all others," she wrote. Why did that piss me off? The whole book had been elegantly written but not too steeped in metaphor, if you know what I mean. I was able to read it without having to stop, think, and analyze every two lines. As an English major, I had to do a whole bunch of that, so I enjoyed reading a book that illustrated how something can be well-written without screaming, "Look at me, I'm well-written!" That's why the last line pissed me off, because now I had to think about what the hell the "gleaming obsidian shard" represented.

That course was actually one of my favorites, because it was structured in the coolest way imaginable for me. 10% of the grade was class participation. The other 90% came from a journal that we wrote in weekly about our thoughts on the books we were reading. We read five books through the quarter, spending two weeks on each. Every Friday, we'd hand in our journal, and on Monday he'd give them back with his thoughts on our thoughts. It didn't really matter what we wrote about, and that was right in my wheelhouse. A particular chapter of one book led me to write about my mom's friend Florence, who was in her mid-to-late 90s at the time, while it led my friend Sara to write about "Fiddler on the Roof." The professor's comments encouraged me to just write my thoughts and not censor them at all, so I didn't hold back when writing about A Thousand Acres.

I remember two parts of my journal entries on that book: the beginning and the end. I started by saying that I really didn't know how big an acre was, so I couldn't tell if a thousand of them would be "a pretty big field" or the size of New Hampshire. I had the feeling that Ms. Smiley wanted readers to think, "Wow, a thousand acres is as huge lot" and be able to picture it, but she missed this reader with that. Then at the end, I wrote about my displeasure with the last line. I wrote, "I'd like to tell you what Jane Smiley can do with that obsidian shard, but I'll keep it clean. No, on second thought, I won't bite my tongue any longer. I'd like to bust that obsidian shard right up Jane Smiley's ass." I did it partly for shock value, partly to amaze my roommates that I would turn something like that in as an assignment, and partly because I wanted to reach the bottom of the page. I kept it in there, printed it out, and turned it in. When he gave it back, there were two exclamation marks next to that line. Below it, he briefly explained his thoughts on what the shard represented, and then told me that I write well.

In hindsight, this blog is his fault. Please send your hate mail to Professor Allaback at UCSB, because he encouraged my tangents enough that I've almost stopped using the backspace key. Speaking of which, I met a young woman named Dalit once (pronounced Dah-LEET), and I said, "You mean like backspace?" She nodded in a way that told me she's heard that a few hundred too many times. There I go again. I have quite the special tangential potential...and apparently too much caffeine this morning. Have a great day, gentle readers, and please look out for gleaming obsidian shards.

As always, email me at ptklein@gmail.com with anything about anything. And by "as always," I mean, "please try it once, see how it feels, and then get hooked on the stardom of having your name appear on the series of tubes that make up the internets."