A Break In Routine

When I get home from work, I have a pretty standard routine.

I come in the door, say hi to R___ (who is usually seated in the living room at his computer), toss any mail I have collected onto the end table by the door, go into the bedroom, and throw my keys in their little ceramic bowl. Then I put my backpack down, unload my wallet and book from the front pouch, and put them in their respective places (the wallet goes by my keys and the book goes on a stack near the mail). Next I unload the larger section of my backpack. If I've gone food shopping, I put those items away first, particularly if there is anything that needs to be refrigerated of frozen. If I went swimming, I take my wet suit and towel into the bathroom and hang them up on the middle two wall hooks, between our towels. If I've brought home my dirty running clothes, I dump them from their plastic bag into the hamper by the bedroom door. Finally, I plug in my iPod (if it's lost its charge) in the living room, remove my shoes and put them in the shoe rack on the back of the bedroom door, and--if I'm home for the evening--change into pajamas.

As you may have determined from the specificity of this routine, I am slightly OCD about it. Putting away everything in its rightful place when I get home comforts me, and I hate being interrupted until I have reached the pajama-wearing stage. When R___ and I first started living together, he simply did not understand. I would walk in the door, and he would immediately accost me with hugs and chatter. Under almost any other circumstance, I like hugs and chatter; however, if it impinges on my Arriving Home Routine, I get anxious and frustrated and usually snap at him until he goes away and lets me finish putting things where they belong.

Sometime this past spring--almost three years since we first moved in together--R___ finally figured it out. He started saying "hello" when I walked in the door from his position in the living room, and then not moving from his chair until I was finally clad in T-shirt and boxer shorts. At first I just assumed he was preoccupied when I arrived home, and braced myself the next day for his inevitable interruption. But it never came. Eventually, I relaxed into my routine and began to approach him after I had finished everything I needed to do.

Yesterday, I arrived home and began my routine as usual. R___ and I said hello, I put the mail on its end table, and I tossed my keys into their bowl. Once my wallet and book were in their proper places, I put the half and half I had bought for R___ in the fridge, and the bags of coffee and Oreos onto the designated snack shelf. Then I went into the bathroom to hang up my swimming gear, and finally returned to the bedroom to retrieve the final item, my iPod, from my backpack. As I was straightening up, iPod in hand, I noticed an orange shape in my peripheral vision. Hmmm, I thought. That's odd. I don't remember hanging anything in that spot on the wall. There used to be a calendar there, but I took it down a while ago.... I turned toward the wall, and low and behold, there was an orange Post-It stuck to the surface!

"5 Reasons Why I Love My Swan*," it read.  "#2: She's super inspiring."

Putting down my iPod, I peeled the Post-It off of the wall and took it into the living room. R___ was already turned toward me, suppressing a grin.

"What's this?" I asked. "Where's number one?"

"You'll have to find it. They're not in a particular order; I just put the five reasons at the top so you knew how many to look for."

I glanced around the living room until I saw another orange square stuck to the black television screen.

"Oooh!" I raced over.

"5 Reasons Why I Love My Swan. #4: She's amazingly supportive."

Suffice to say, I spent the next few minutes on one of the most fun, spontaneous scavenger hunts ever. And all before I plugged in my iPod or even took off my shoes. 

Sometimes a break in routine is totally worth it.

*Every couple has weird nicknames for one another. This happens to be mine.

Snapshot Book Review: The Silver Linings Playbook

The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I am about to say this for what I think is the very first time: I liked the movie better.

Granted, I did see the movie first, but in the past, that hasn't proven to sway my liking one way or the other. I saw the film adaptations of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Girl Interrupted, and The Princess Bride before I read them, and I liked all of those books just fine.

I really did like the movie. I thought Jennifer Lawrence (Tiffany) and Bradley Cooper (Pat) had great chemistry onscreen, Robert De Niro did a great job playing the emotionally absent, and the supporting characters were nuanced enough to avoid falling into stereotypes (the brother, the therapist, the football fans, etc.).

However, the book really let me down. In no particular order, here are my grievances:

--I found the ending to the book to be--literally--incredible because the romance itself, from a reader's standpoint, never blossomed in the first place. We were essentially told that Tiffany was in love with Pat, but Quick never offered any details to persuade me that her love was genuine . . . or that Pat felt anything in return. That he comes to also fall in love with her in the very last scene of the book feels contrived and simply too neat and tidy for what should otherwise have been a relationship fraught with deception and mistrust.

--The relationship between Pat's father, mother, and Pat himself is never really explored. Their issues are laid out there for the reader to see (the emotionally absent, temermental husband doesn't appreciate the soft-hearted caretaking wife, nor is he capable of connecting with his mentally unstable son), but these issues never seem to serve any purpose other than to give us a sense of Pat's home life. The mother stands up to the father at one point, but to what end? Eventually things slide back to the way they were, with little change on the father's part other than that he eats the occasional meal at the table with his family and leaves the sports sections on the stairs for Pat to read (which I guess is supposed to prove he is trying to "meaningfully connect" with his son). The father remains superstitious about the Eagles throughout the novel, and unlike in the movie, it seems that all Eagles fans are equally superstitious in the book. Therefore, what was the point?

--Pat's relationship with his therapist never really comes to any sort of meaningful conclusion, either. In the movie, you can see his progress through his sessions with the Cliff, but in the book, these sessions seem to serve more as interludes to tell us more about Pat than they do as devices to further any character or plot development.

So, in short, this is one of those rare books I'd recommend skipping and watching the movie instead.

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A Reason to Stay for the Raffle

"Ugh, do we have to?" My sister's hands were on her hips, and she was giving me a look that said Seriously, you are so annoying.

"Come on, why not?" I wiped a few strands of sweaty hair out of my eyes and looked imploringly at my parents. "It's free, and you don't know what they might be giving away."

Both my mom and my dad shrugged and looked at my sister. Rolling her eyes and sighing dramatically, Amy followed me as I led the family toward the bleachers where the raffle and awards ceremony were to be held in about twenty minutes.

Amy and I had just finished running the Gatorade Steelers 5k--a Pittsburgh race, with a surprisingly flat out-and-back course that began outside Heinz Field, followed along the Allegheny River, and then finished back inside the stadium. It was definitely one of the more memorable race finishes: as you burst out of the tunnel and into the stadium, you could almost imagine you were a famous football player, sprinting toward the crowd way up in the stands.

I had told my family that I just wanted to stay for the raffle (which was free to all the race participants), but the truth was that I had a sneaking suspicion that I might have earned an age group prize. Because the course was out-and-back, as I got closer to the turnaround point, I could see the faster runners flying past me the opposite direction. Once I saw the first woman, I started keeping count. It's surprisingly difficult to pay attention and mentally keep a running tally while your legs are burning and your chest feels like it's going to explode, but if my count was anything close to accurate, there were only about 10 women in front of me when I reached the turnaround, and I passed 2 of them on the way to the finish. So assuming all of those women weren't between the ages of 25-29, I figured had a pretty decent chance of coming in at least 3rd in my age group.

The whole raffle/awards ceremony of course started late, as these things tend to do, and it seemed to drag on and on. The raffle winners had to be present to win, so that process took much longer than it probably should have, since so many of the people whose names were drawn had apparently left the premises. (Although one girl, whose name was announced along with her city of residence--Baltimore--was booed so severely that she may have been present but afraid to show her face!) Some of the winners also didn't shout loudly enough to indicate they were present and trying to reach the stage, so that didn't help.

"Don't worry," my mom told me, "if they call your name, there won't be any question where you are in this crowd." Did I mention that my mom used to sing opera?

They're not going to call our names, I could see my sister thinking, even as she remained crouched over her iPod. We're not going to win anything, and we'll have wasted two hours of our time.

The event dragged on, and I could see my sister getting more and more annoyed.

"Maybe we should just leave," I acquiesced. If all this waiting turned out to be for nothing, then not only would my sister be supremely annoyed, but I'd also be disappointed, but too embarrassed to even tell my family why.

"I'm ready when you are," Amy agreed.

Still, I stayed seated. They were finally announcing first, second, and third places for the Age Group divisions, so it wouldn't be too long now. Finally, my age group was called.

"In third place, for the female division ages 25-29...." The announcer said a name and a time, and for the first time during the whole ceremony, Amy looked up from playing Candy Crush.

"Hey, what was your time again?"

The announcer continued. "In second place, with a time of...."

Amy nudged me with her elbow. "Didn't you run faster than that?"

I grinned.

"And in first place with a time of 19:20...."

Man, you should have heard my mom holler.

A note about the official results of this race:
In spite of receiving the first place 25-29 age group trophy--which was quite thrilling, I must admit, and came with Steelers tickets!-- I'm still not positive that I actually won my age group. The first three 25-29 finishers placed first, second, and third overall for all women, so I understand if they were taken out of the running. However, I finished fifth. Therefore, something must have happened with the fourth place finisher . . . or else she's going to be pretty unhappy at having been forgotten. I know I would be if I were her!

Race Length	Finishing Time	Average Pace	Overall Place	Gender Place	Age Group Place (F25-29)
5k	19:20	6:13/mile	78/3,318	7/1,805	5/313

Snapshot Book Review: Good Kings Bad Kings

Good Kings Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To summarize this book as best I can, it is essentially a new, modern version of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Primary differences are: It's written from a variety of perspectives (rather than just one.
2. The institutionalized characters are adolescent "crips" (i.e. physically and sometimes mentally handicapped) rather than mentally handicapped adults.

However, just like Kesey's novel, Good Kings Bad Kings looks at an institution that, on the surface, is meant for good, and goes inside the walls, looking at it from the perspectives of not only "inmates," but also staff who work there and witness injustices yet feel powerless to prevent them.

While Nussbaum does a fantastic job of capturing the voices of lower class children and adults both with and without learning disabilities, I was especially impressed with her decision to include chapters written from the perspective Michelle, a female recruiter whose job it is to fill beds at ILLC, an institution for juveniles with disabilities. Michelle's chapters demonstrate that strictly vilifying everyone involved in running these sorts of institutions isn't quite fair . . . or accurate. She is just a middle-to-lowerclass woman trying to make it through life without always having to scrape the bottom of her piggybank to make ends meet. She doesn't necessarily set out to lock away perfect normal young people; she just wants to do her job and get praise and approval from her boss--like any of us. Michelle's chapters bring very necessary balance to this novel, making it more than just a captor-captive story.

Well done, Susan Nussbaum. I look forward to reading whatever you write next.

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Snapshot Book Review: Speak

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anderson does a great job capturing the internal voice of 9th grade Melinda. I especially love the way she does dialogue and makes up nicknames for the other characters. For instance, there's a teacher she refers to as Mr. Neck. If she and Mr. Neck were conversing, it would go something like:

Mr. Neck: What are you doing in here?

Me: Nothing

Mr. Neck: Doesn't look like nothing.

Me:

Leaving that blank in lieu of writing something like "I don't respond" is brilliant, especially in a book where the point is that Melinda cannot seem to speak up for herself.

I will admit, from the outset I did know what the Big Secret was, but because it was so predictable, I'm glad that Anderson didn't drag out the process of revealing it. She gets it into the first half of the book without too much fanfare, and we the readers are left to focus on what really matters: Melinda's coping mechanisms; her relationships with fellow students, former friends, and teachers; her family dynamic; etc. I also really like the fact that while there is clearly a romantic interest between Melinda and her lab partner, it doesn't ever blossom into a full subplot and, consequently, threaten to take over the focus of the novel.

The ending, too, was predictable (you know there's another confrontation coming between her and IT), but I don't think it could have ended any other way.

Now, I really just want to see the art teacher's mural. Come on fan fiction artists!

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