“I love everything my sister loves, but I will not admit it. I know she and her friends will make fun of me. I know my parents will chastise me and correct me. I am learning the rules, and I am learning that boys liking girl things is a very high stakes issue. I am learning that adults react the same way to my interest in makeup as they do to my interest in matches and lighters. [¶] As if maybe, by being what I am, I might burn down something very important to them. Something that makes their life more comfortable and easy.” — Jennifer Coates
Tag: childhood
This website was archived on July 21, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.
The Best of Men
“I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire.” — Fred Rogers speaking to the Senate, 1969
Book Review: Through Eyes Like Mine, A Memoir Of Oregonian Girlhood
First I gotta ask: is anyone even interested in book reviews? Personally, I never read them, except occasionally after I finish a horrible book and I want to find out if other people hated it too. Besides that circumstance, why would I read a book review? I have no shortage of reading material, so it’s not like I need to find books to add to my list. But I guess some people like them, and at least it gives “Google juice” to an author I like.
Noriko Nakada’s memoir Through Eyes Like Mine describes childhood as an introspective Japanese-American tomboy in the semi-wilderness of Bend, Oregon. For those who don’t know, Oregon isn’t famous for its racial diversity. I don’t want to one-dimensionally cast this as an Asian-stuck-among-white-people story. Purely logistically, it is that story.
However, Through Eyes Like Mine is also about the social pressures of being a girl, about navigating siblinghood. It’s about how children deal with deaths in their communities, coming to terms with pain and mortality. It’s about the strain of monitoring your parents’ marriage, which every kid does but especially kids whose parents are tense with each other. I enjoyed the book and immediately bought the middle-school sequel, Overdue Apologies, which hasn’t arrived yet from Powell’s, alas.
In other reading-related news, I started using Instapaper. Prolly gonna like it. Thank goodness that spellcheck accepts “prolly” as a word now! Not to mention “spellcheck”. I don’t remember right-click educating Chrome on those terms but I must have.
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