Book Club: Fobbit

Are there 16-year-olds who don’t think Catch-22 is awesome? What about The Things They Carried? Or Slaughterhouse Five? To a certain type of pre-intellectual kid, these tongue-in-cheek, what-does-it-all-mean, to-hell-with-authority, don’t-trust-anyone-over-35 novels are a rite of passage. I was no exception, and I bet you weren’t either.

Truth be told, I haven’t really read a novel in which a war was the centerpiece of the narrative in about ten years. It makes me nervous, it makes me sad. I avoid it. I have no stomach for violence. I vomited while reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and thus have avoided this particular genre for the most part. I wouldn’t have picked this up at all if it weren’t at the urging of one of my friends, and I’m glad I took her advice. Fobbit was another quick-but-significant read, and it’s in the same vein of the aforementioned novels. If you like that, you’re in the right place. Be forewarned, if you aren’t already, that this isn’t a shoot-em-up, glory days memoir, but something that feels at once worse and better than that. Stories like No Easy Day, while less fun to read, feel better because they can make you believe in the moral rectitude of war. There’s room for that, for sure, but there’s a place at the table for Fobbit, too.

I love a good flag motif.

I love a good flag motif.

Fobbit tells the story of the trials and tribulations of several soldiers at Forward Operating Base Triumph in the middle of the war in Iraq. In the alphabet soup that is the military jargon, FOB is the abbreviation for Forward Operating Base, and “fobbit” is the name for the soldiers who work “inside the wire”, which is to say they stay on the FOB rather than going out to the very front. In years past (say Korea or Vietnam), the rear was pretty safe (think M.A.S.H.), but now, they occupy a weird liminal space where they’re not really safe at all, but they’re not likely to actively engage in firefight or eat M.R.E.s. That’s what this book is about. The folks Abrams covers range from the fobbitiest of fobbits to bona fide tough guys, and it follows in the tradition of Heller, O’Brien, and Vonnegut: no one’s a hero, no one’s a winner, there are only plots on a continuum of gray. David Abrams is an insider’s insider, and he brings humor, wit, and intellect to a war narrative.

The primary characters we get to know over the course of Fobbit are Staff Sergeant Gooding, Captain Shrinkle, Lieutenant Colonel Duret, and Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad. I have the dubious privilege of knowing a lot of soldiers who have fought in the Iraq and Afghan conflicts over the last decade, and you can be damn sure I recognized them all. You’ve got CPT Shrinkle, a guy who has somehow been allowed outside the wire and given decision-making capacity. There’s LTC Duret, a steely-eyed, hard-bellied professional with nothing but contempt for the pasty dudes hanging out at Triumph. LTC Harkleroad is the contemporary equivalent of your great uncle who claims to have Hitler’s piano key in his bureau but was secretly a translator who came in after the fact to clean up. Then there’s SSG Gooding, who is the closest thing we’ve got to a hero. He’s smarter than your average bear, and he manages outgoing messages to the American press. Gooding’s never going to see a moment on the honest-to-God front, and he’s smart enough to know that’s not necessarily the worst fate he could have, though he understands that those guys know something he doesn’t. Even the minor characters I met in passing were men and women I’d encountered before.Abrams tells their tales chapter by chapter; some of the best parts are when you get to look at the same event through the eyes of several different people, all of whom see things very differently indeed. He does a spectacular job capturing their voices- the jargon, the off-color jokes, the slapstickishness. I’m sure his twenty years in the army helped him to fine tune this, though sometimes it goes a step further than I’d like, and it makes the dialogue sound a little stilted to the civilian ear.

Fobbit is the kind of book that can make you feel feels, as the kids say. I hated Eustace Harkleroad and Abe Shrinkle and the others who were like them in a way that I thought was almost undignified. The obsession with creating the Army Story (the former) and having one’s own war story to tell (the latter) made my vision narrow. Even the more throwaway details about them- that they were hoarders, or slovenly, or whatever- made me hate them. When clues came that some of them might not make it back to America, I can’t say I was upset. They were malingerers, the very worst of Uncle Sam’s Finest. But then I realized that that weird feeling of anger extended to Gooding and his buddies, too. Even though they saw what they were doing and they knew it was wrong, they carried out orders. They were part of the problem, and they extended the problem’s reach. About 200 pages in, I realized I was just angry at the whole concept of war and the army and was having the feelings I had when I read about the soldiers in The Things They Carried shooting the skin off the baby water buffalo. I wanted one of them to do something he couldn’t do: stand up, tell everyone that they were doing something wrong, and then tell the rest of the world what they knew. That’s not ever going to happen, regardless of what war we get into or out of. They weren’t horrible, they were just people responding to horror. Horror makes a fool of us all.

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Lazy Sunday: 23 March 2014

After proof that a full moon can take a wrecking ball to everything you think you know, it’ll be nice to just sit around and read today, right?

  • I have lived and will continue to live in places at the periphery of reliable smartphone coverage, so this is excellent news for me, a chronically lost person.
  • Haven’t gotten through all this yet, but Guernica’s American South issue has a ton of great pieces to explore at your leisure across interview, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and art. Enjoy.
  • I am very excited about the new Wes Anderson because I love artists with obvious signatures, and he was really influential on the development of my personal style. I welcome any and all looks inside the little dollhouse of his mind.
  • Interesting quick read about the black press during the Civil War.
  • My friend sent me this thing about the tulip stock market and whoa, plants are so crazy! I’m reading a book about flowers right now, so it feels like everything is about this. WAKE UP SHEEPLE.
  • Let’s have a talk about fast fashion and all that entails.
  • Oology is the study of bird eggs, and this is a long read about tracking down people who steal them from nests. I know this sounds so boring, but it was every bit as compelling as The Wire.
  • Basically every woman in the known world is sorry you aren’t Idris Elba, too. Also, these are HILARIOUS and it’s impossible to know who’s mad and who’s just saying funny stuff.
  • Hey, this is a really nice story about a guy who tracked down the guy who talked him off a bridge.
  • So far, I’ve only ever been to four of these, and I’m optimistic to visit all of them! Looks like there is great coffee to be had the world over, including in Antarctica!

You Should Know How to Do This: Be Clean

Everyone who knows me, with the notable exception of my mother, agrees that I am a Clean Person. Staci’s house is kept at all times at hospital-grade sterility and Pottery Barn catalog levels of lovely, and she considers the Dairy Queen to be the absolute height of filth, so in recent years I decided her opinion is not one I can take into account. Sorry, Mommy! Everyone else, though- they all agree I keep a real clean house. There’s pretty much nothing worse in the whole world than staying the night with a friend, or being invited to your cousin’s for dinner and finding that everything is covered in a sticky film, or that there’s cat pee staining the rug. I’m not saying you’re that cousin, but if you are, I want to show you how to dig yourself out with a minimum of cussing and sweating.

It was not always this way. To paraphrase 1 Corinthians, when I was a college student, I swept as a college student, I laundered as a college student, I Windexed as a college student. When I became a grownup, I put the ways of college behind me. I first got my own space about four years ago. Initially, I was so pumped because any mess I made was my mess, and I was the only person I had to clean up for. I had a washer and dryer at my place for the first time ever and I had a dishwasher. After four years in dorms and keeping it as clean as I could in the wake of seven suitemates, I was in tall cotton, and I let it get filthy. I embraced dimmer switches and lived out of a series of piles.

dirtyhouse

No, of course this is not mine. That coverlet is ugly.

That worked for me for about 3 months and by September or so, I hated everything. I had always dreaded cleaning as a kid- and to be honest, it’s not like I love it now- and I didn’t want to devote my whole Saturday to Windexing baseboards and polishing silverware. I was also living on $12,000 a year, and couldn’t afford stuff like Pledge wipes, which were suddenly a luxury item. So I decided to change.

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Tea Party Tuesday: Octavia Blood Orange White

photo (1)

They had sniffing samples, which freaks me out a little but not enough not to sniff.

Sometimes, you think it is Tuesday, so you get up and get dressed and go to work, but then you get a phone call, and two hours later you’re eating a week-old mango in the parking lot of South of the Border on the way to Fayetteville, North Carolina. While I don’t recommend that particular timeline for your stress levels or workplace productivity, these things happen.

Before we begin, I would like to say that if you ever find yourself in Fayetteville, I strongly recommend you wander over to Marquis Market. It’s on Person Street in the historic part of downtown, and it’s a hidden gem. Expansive and warm, it looks like something on Apartment Therapy, and has Boylan sodas in the machine and good coffee and sandwiches to boot. It’s also super cheap. They stock Octavia Teas, which I am not too familiar with. I grabbed a cup of the Blood Orange White and commenced to drinking and contemplating how I got to this place.

What do you know about white tea? You probably know it’s a little pricier and would guess it’s a bit delicate in flavor. It’s a lightly oxidized tea, and it is purported to have antibacterial properties. Cool, right? It also helps improve blood flow and can reduce stress. Blood oranges have a ton of vitamin C, so you can’t lose there, either.

I wanted to love this, because I love the gentle flavors that white teas have, and I am eager for citrus season every year. I was curious how the blood oranges, which are a vibrant taste, and the more nuanced tea would balance and they just…didn’t. It didn’t really have enough of either to be satisfying, and it mostly just tasted like a gently scented water. It tasted like the third steep on the first. If you like something very, very mild, this might be for you, but I wasn’t crazy about it.

I’m interested in trying out some of the other products Octavia’s got. If this sounds like it’s for you, it’s $13 for an ounce and a quarter and can be purchased here.

Anyone tried a tea I might should try? I’m all ears.

Book Club: Fun Home

If you haven’t heard, the South Carolina legislature is trying to slash the College of Charleston’s book budget because they’re assigning gay propaganda. Every year, the College, conveniently located a eight blocks from my house (hi Miles [my upstairs neighbor and C of C junior]!), gives every member of the freshman class a book to read together. It’s just a nice thing they do. I think UVA did this too, but I can’t remember, so impactful was their choice. The book this year was Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which I borrowed from a buddy and read in solidarity. Since I live and vote in this state, and thus pay these guys’ salaries, I wanted to see why they had their panties in a twist.

Ooo, a graphic novel! Fancy!

Ooo, a graphic novel! Fancy!

Fun Home tells the story of Alison Bechdel: a girl/woman from a small town in Pennsylvania who grows up, goes to college, and figures out she’s gay and her dad is, too. Her parents are eccentric, isolated, and artistic, and incidentally own the town funeral home. They live in a house filled with books and antiques and flowers and art, but very little warmth. Almost immediately upon her coming out to her family, her father sort of comes out to her, then kills himself (probably? hard to say). That premise alone was enough to get me to pick it up, plus I was vaguely aware of Alison Bechdel as the creator of her eponymous test. As you may know, I love both small town freaks and litmus tests, so this seemed great. Add the intrigue of Palmetto State legislative scandal and some truly outstanding illustrations and you have a recipe for success.

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Lazy Sunday: 16 March 2014

I found this old list of articles I forgot to post, so what better time than now to share them?

  • “Mistakes were made” has its own Wikipedia page.
  • A long read about the over-diagnosis of ADD/ADHD and how we got here. Fun fact: when I took the little quiz at the bottom, it said I probably have ADD, and so do about 50-60% of Americans!
  • The Onion gets just a step too close to home again.
  • I don’t know a ton about how spam comments work (other than the fact that I get a lot of them here), but The Awl figured it out, and explained it in terms I mostly understood!
  • Regardless of how you feel about eating meat, eggs, and dairy (things I eat sometimes!), read this Rolling Stone article about factory farming. It’s important and it’s not earth mother bullshit.
  • Here’s a sweet video of a leopard and a baboon that doesn’t start out so great, but is pretty darn cute.
  • Irregular sleeping is a high-risk behavior, and the one most commonly engaged in in America today. I am questioning my entire self-perception as a morning person now.
  • I had been following the Robert Levinson story for awhile, so I don’t know why it never occurred to me that he was involved in an off-book CIA mission. I sincerely thought that only happened on Covert Affairs.
  • Tavi Geveneson is precocious, but this great and thoughtful piece sounds exactly like something I wrote when I was seventeen-going-on-eighteen (also precocious). Do you remember this feeling? I remember this feeling.
  • The layout of this Globe piece on the Tsarnevs of Boston infamy is fascinating, and the result of a five month investigation. Must read.

After I compiled these, I realized I skewed kinda dark this week. Next week, it’ll be all puppies and rainbows, k?

Midweek Craft: DIY Mirror Glass

You know what’s super annoying? When every damned thing on a blog is something that would take your whole weekend/all your vacation days/the rest of your life and a degree in fiber arts to complete. Chronderlust is not about that. Chronderlust is about coming home from the gym and deciding to make something kinda pretty on Wednesday before you reheat curry and watch The Sopranos (actual description of today). Behold: Mercury glass, the ultimate stupidly easy craft that also looks awesome.

Oh, look, both of these are pretty, but only one is expensive.

Oh, look, both of these are pretty, but only one is expensive.

You have three of the four things you need for this in your house right now. After the jump, I’ll show you how to do this, and then you, too, will have a bunch of nice hostess gifts in your present closet that you can stuff full of Publix flowers if you get invited to a dinner party last second. Stop looking at me like that; that is a totally normal thing to stock for and I resent the accusation that it isn’t.

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