Have you read this article in today's Wall Street Journal about dark themes in YA fiction?

I'm really not sure what to think of it. I'll admit that I'm not a huge fan of the unrelenting grimness in a lot of today's teen literature, and I never got into problem novels, even though I was a teenager at the time when they were flourishing. At the same time, these issues are there, and high schoolers have to deal with them, and to try to create a world where they don't exist seems to me as much an act of deliberate fantasy as any genre work. Which isn't to say that I don't love a good romp with Edward Eager or Elizabeth Enright. But Swallows and Amazons doesn't look any more like my life than Harry Potter does. And I would quickly lose patience with wholesome coming-of-age stories if they were the only fare available. Maybe the article isn't arguing that wholesome coming-of-age stories should be the only fare available. Maybe it's just bewailing the lack of them. But if that's the case, they aren't looking in the right places. The Penderwicks is about as wholesome as they come, even if the mother is dead. And George R. R. Martin or no George R. R. Martin, there's a great deal of tame, wholesome fantasy and science fiction available right now (one that comes to mind is Hilari Bell's Knight and Rogue, and another is Wrede's Frontier Magic).

I think my real issue with this is the whole "it's not censorship, it's responsible parenting" stance. On the one hand, I can understand the I don't want my kid reading that! impulse. Also the complaint that vivid depictions of cutting could be a trigger. But at the same time, that's still censorship.

I also find it really interesting that one of their recommended books is Fahrenheit 451. I find it less interesting that they've divided their "Books we can recommend for young adult readers" section into Books for Young Men (Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi; Peace, Richard Bausch; Old School, Tobias Wolff; Farenheit 451, Bradbury; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Hadon; True Grit, Charles Portis) and Books for Young Women (What I Saw and How I Lied, Judy Blundell; Ophelia, Lisa Kline; Angelmonster, Veronica Bennett; Z for Sachariah, Robert C. O'Brien; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith). Can't books just be Books for Young People? Or Books for People? And while I haven't read a lot of the books I just listed, the descriptions use a lot of words like "gritty" and "violent." And my memory of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, admittedly from a great many years ago, is that it was pretty heavy stuff.

Maybe part of my problem is that there are books available in just about whatever you're looking for these days. If you don't like the mainstream bestsellers, buy the stuff you do approve of and try to push publishers that way. And I still maintain that the best way for parents to deal with kids reading problematic books is to talk to the kids about what they're reading.



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Also?
It occurred to me this week that I'm going to Zambia in a little over two months. Starting to freak out a little about that.

We live in an age where seedless watermelon comes with disclaimers. ("May contain the occasional seed.")


Or perhaps I'm starting too far in, and should first highlight that we live in an age with seedless watermelons.

I hate phones.

This is WHY I hate phones. Well, not this specific issue. I've never had this specific issue before.

I've never needed a way to say, "I feel that what you just said is very ignorant and hurtful, and I would appreciate if you would give me a few minutes to recover my composure so that I can talk to you without wanting to cry."

I was always a heavy child. There are pictures of me as a three-year-old that would probably be described as "sturdy." From what I recall of my pediatrician's charts, I've been above the 80th or 90th percentile, weight-wise, my whole life. I've always been on the tall side, too, but not as much as I've been on the heavy side. I reached my full height -- I don't know, seventh grade, maybe. I have weighed what I do, give or take twenty pounds (mostly give), for at least the past ten years.

I have played field hockey and struggled with my weight. I've played lacrosse badly and struggled with my weight. I have walked over a mile to and from school and struggled with my weight. I've been a fencer and struggled with my weight. I have played sports for multiple hours a day, three or four or five days a week, and eaten pretty well, and still weighed exactly what I do now.


My research about Zambia has led me to conclude that the Zambian diet is largely starch-based. And I know, from 23 years of living in my body (plus the reasoned opinion of some medical professionals), that it is not good for me to eat mostly starches. And since the program coordinator had not yet responded to my email of a week and a half ago, I called her this afternoon.

I was not looking for her to snap her fingers and guarantee that everything would be fine. But I felt (still feel) that "It is a concern to me that there be vegetables in my diet in addition to starch" is a reasonable thing to ask for. I know that most of Zambia lives at the subsistence level, if that, but I think that it's reasonable to request that the diet I need to be healthy be at least considered while looking for my housing placement.

And if I can't be accommodated, then I will deal, and work extra-hard once I'm back in the States where I can control my food intake.

Her immediate response included, "You're looking at the effects of diet on a sedentary first-world lifestyle; I've never known a fat Zambian."

My lifestyle is pretty sedentary right now. But it hasn't always been. And weight has always been a struggle. I will also point out that I'm currently at a healthier place, weight-wise, than I've been in the past five years.

She also told me, in a kindly and gentle sort of way, that people in Zambia eat to survive and there isn't the same range of available food that there is here. I wasn't asking for an American grocery store! If there is one leafy green weed available in Zambia, I will eat the same leafy green weed every day and get very tired of it, but it will be a vegetable in my diet.

She would try to help, but she "wanted me to be more specific."

She told me that my cross-cultural experience in Spain was giving me an unrealistic view of the availability of food. (I was making this phone call partly because of the paucity of vegetables in the Spanish diet, which had been a problem for me.)

I was trying (and failing) not to cry since probably the first minute of the phone conversation, and it just went on and on and on and she kept talking and I couldn't get out of it. This was not the easiest phone call to make in the first place -- the email was hard to write; it's not something I'm all that comfortable discussing with strangers, and especially something I'm not particularly comfortable bringing attention to to ask for accommodation for. And she was implying in her nice motherly tone that I'm a spoiled, privileged kid who doesn't know how good she has it and only has trouble with her weight because of her lifestyle, and look at her quaint first-world problems.

I'm going to go knit for two hours.

Watch out: I have a screwdriver and I know how to use it!

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When I upload pictures from my camera, I'll tell you about the circus tent fabric cover for a trapeze rig that covered my living room with 132 yards of fabric yesterday.

I found a copy of Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic on the discarded books truck at my library this afternoon.

Neil Gaiman.

This is the collection that contains "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" (Only my favorite Gaiman story ever, even more than "A Study in Emerald") and the short story that became The Graveyard Book, plus some other stuff that I don't know about BECAUSE I HAVEN'T READ IT YET.

I'm a Gaiman fan, I'm a fantasy fan, I'm a YA lit fan. I was vaguely aware that this collection existed (it came out in June 2007), but I only realized that the library had it about a month ago, at which point I promptly requested a copy. I HAVE THIS BOOK ON RESERVE. And it was on the weeded-out truck at my local library, going for free starting tomorrow (currently twenty-five cents).

This is not an abused copy. It is a clean, gorgeous hardcover that the library has maybe had for at most three years.

There were a bunch of other teen books there, too, most of them hardcover, nothing I would consider quite as much of a gem as this one (the third book about a Chosen Girl trying to live an Ordinary Life, etc, etc), but stuff that kids would read, if it were on the shelf. Most of them new-looking. Probably most of them published in the past five years.

My librarian left for lunch as I was standing there puzzling over this phenomenon, and told me quietly, "She's raping the teen collection. I don't think she's even looking them up to see if they circulate, just throwing them out." And there was definitely more fantasy than, say, Problem Novels.

WASN'T IT BAD ENOUGH THAT YOU THREW OUT MY SCI-FI/FANTASY COLLECTION?

And, silly me, I had been wondering why we no longer seemed to have a copy of A Coalition of Lions when I know for a fact that my local branch had a copy when I was in high school.

Why are these books being thrown out? THERE ISN'T ANY MONEY TO REPLACE THEM.

GRRRRRRRRRRR.

So, once upon a time, Doctor Who mostly made sense, and I liked it that way. There were a couple of instances of sciencefail, but I could usually ignore them and get on with enjoying the plot, which tended to be cohesive and reasonable if I ignored that it was built on sciencefail. And mostly I didn't need to do that.

However, I've spent the past three episodes going, "What? WHAT? WHAT???" For large sections of sciencefail, plot not making sense, things not behaving the way they were previously established to . . .

( Spoilery complaints. I'm up to S5E5. )

When did 'evil' become something the doctor was concerned with, anyway? I guess it showed up with Seven, some, but I don't remember it at all in Four, Five, or Six, and nowadays it's like evil is the new bubble wrap, and you can't be a cool monster without it. This isn't D&D. (Although that one episode was a bunch of clerics splitting the party on a dungeon-crawl.)

And when did we start monologuing all the time without ever actually sharing information with people? Is this don't-tell-anyone-anything season?

( Cut for ginormousness )

Possibly there are other things that I was intending to put on this list, but I don't remember what they were.
I think what it boils down to is: I don't have any good reasons not to go to Zambia. There are valid concerns on the Cons list -- but I don't know that any of them are good reasons not to go.
And do I really want to be able to say, in ten years, "I could have gone to Zambia, but I decided to stay home in Philadelphia and be unemployed/work some boring job instead?" No, I don't really want to.
So I guess I'm going to say yes.

Somehow this feels a much more momentous decision than picking which college I was going to, or going to Spain.

Edited to add: I just sent the email telling her that I'll go.

It is related, though. Possibly it falls under the category of things that made Small Miriam into Big Miriam.

Right now I'm somewhere in the application process of an organization that rumorofrain has been referring to as the Mennonite Peace Corps. It's not an entirely accurate description, as you don't need to be Mennonite, but it's close enough. They do want you to be an active member of a Christian church, and to agree to abide by their lifestyle expectations. Okay, fine, lifestyle expectations. I think that living simply and an agreement to not racially and/or sexually harass people are good things. And I'm perfectly willing to abide by the drug and alcohol policy. Personally, I don't expect to have issues following any of this stuff. However.

"MCC requires sexual celibacy for personnel outside of a heterosexual marriage relationship during their terms of service with MCC.

Persons of homosexual orientation who meet MCC personnel criteria as noted above will be considered for MCC service if they are willing to abide by MCC's requirement of celibacy for all outside of a heterosexual marriage and if they will not use MCC as a platform from which to advocate for same-sex sexual relationships."

ISSUES ISSUES ISSUES.
Okay, they're a church group. If they want people to be celibate outside of a committed relationship, that's their prerogative, I guess. But I have serious problems with specifying that your committed relationship has to be a heterosexual marriage. And I think the little "the gays are welcome so long as they're willing to act straight" addendum almost makes it worse.

My mother's take on this is that that particular requirement and that particular phrasing is put in there to appease the funding base. I was still feeling somewhat grumpy about the whole affair, though.

And then I realized that part of the application included this question: ( Write about a time when you observed racism, sexism or other forms of oppression, or participated in efforts to work against racism, sexism or other forms of oppression. Please elaborate. )

My mother can be fairly compulsive at times. One of the things that she is compulsive about is the kitchen cupboards. They don't need to be neat, the organization doesn't always entirely make sense -- but if there is food that's been in there for a long time that we're not using, it bothers her. So every so often we acquire a list on the fridge, next to the shopping lists, of Food To Use Up. Right now cocoa powder is on that list. She got unsweetened cocoa powder for some cooking project ages ago, and it's been there for over a year now, not going anywhere fast. So when she declared that we should start thinking of ways to use it, I said, "Weren't you talking about some tomato sauce they made it Guatemala with chocolate in it?"

And so I present my recipe for molé poblano:
( Also millet muffins, which are very good, too. )

None of the people I usually babble at seem to be online, so I'm going to babble about my response to Jo Walton's Farthing on lj instead.

. . . it's interesting to note that today's writer's block is about racism.

( Cut for sort-of general spoilers )