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Did you know that 2k12 is going to be over in, like, 24 days? I know everyone’s always all, “GOSH, where did this year go?!” but no, for real, WHERE DID THIS FUCKING YEAR GO?! I moved halfway across the country this year, I can’t be held responsible for keeping track of time.
Anyway, in celebration/mourning of the year past, I’m going to to some Totally Top Five posts! Because there is literally nothing I love more than forcing my opinion on other people and then encouraging them to spend money on the stuff I’ve told them to like. I promise none of these lists will include a $45 candle or a $120 blanket or, like, Le Sang du Nourrisson Face Cream that costs $360 for an ounce. I cannot promise that these lists won’t include something you think is dumb. But, let’s be real, that’s probably just a sign that you suck.
I am starting with music because… I don’t know, it seemed as good a place as any to start. Plus it’s unlikely that I will suddenly get SUPER into something that comes out in the next couple of weeks. I’m not that on top of shit.
These five were all big summer songs for me and things that I associate with moving to North Dakota and also the first few weeks here. I was just listening to them a LOT at the time and they’ll probably be stuck with those memories forever, for better or worse.
Without further ado, my top five (by number of plays) songs added to my iTunes library this year:
5. Alex Clare, “Too Close” [youtube | amazon.com]
Not going to lie, I’ve loved this song since I heard it in that Internet Explorer commercial for the first time. It sounds like The Black Keys did a dubstep project and I L-O-V-E it. I love his voice on this particular track and I’m glad he’s had some fame. He seems like a nice dude.
4. Ellie Goulding, “Lights (Bassnectar Remix)” [youtube | amazon.com]
I heard this on Pandora for the first time, but it was a song that couldn’t be escaped, right? I like the original too, but this remix is pretty far superior. I’ve grown to sort of love Ellie Goulding in general in the many months since I first heard this and there are at least three of her songs I love with a far greater intensity than this one, but this is a solid holding and I apparently listened to it a lot this year.
3. Flight Facilities, “Crave You (Adventure Club Dubstep Remix)” [youtube | amazon.com]
I heard this on Pandora too, on a playlist based on The Knife, I think. It came up often, but I downloaded it and listened to it in my car a lot with the volume up really loud and the windows down. Hearing this feels like late summer and dry, hot air. I feel sort of neutral on the whole dubstep thing in general, but I like it here.
2. Cold War Kids, “Hang Me Up to Dry” [youtube | amazon.com]
Yet another Pandora discovery, probably from the same station. I got OBSESSED with that titular line in the song and the sort of wailing desperation of it. Like, play just that section over and over again obsessed. And then the clanging out of tune piano? Out of bounds greatness.
1. Count and Sinden featuring Rye Rye, “Hardcore Girls” [youtube | amazon.com]
You know how every once in a while you hear a song for the first time and your jaw just kind of drops and everything slows down a little bit around you and you’re just totally flabbergasted by the experience of it? That’s how I spent the first minute of this song the first time it passed me on my Tumblr dash. It only lasted a minute because the uncontrollable urge to dance to it hit me at about 1:08 and I actually got out of my chair and threw myself around the room to it. Then I replayed it and did it again. Louder.
Epping, North Dakota is a really, really small town founded in 1905 along the Great Northern Railway.
 When I say “small town,” I really, really mean small. Like, unbelievably small. Small like it has a total area of 0.38 square miles. Small like it had a population of exactly 100 in the 2010 census. Small like for the entire twenty minutes we were driving around the whopping three blocks that make up the city, we saw one other human being.
 The Buffalo Trails Museum was closed just like every other business we saw. They’d just had their annual Buffalo Trail Day event which includes a pancake dance and church services and an ice cream social. We figure they must have been recovering.
 There isn’t much here except a grain elevator and oil storage. This is where most of the oil pumped in the area goes to meet the train and head for processing because despite the massive amount of oil coming out of the Bakken formation, it’s all got to be shipped to refineries elsewhere.
 
People in North Dakota are very serious about their Scandinavian heritage. I didn’t know the US was so into their viking-ass history until I got here. Seriously. Wait ’til you see the pictures of Minot.
Epping is weird as hell. The weekend we were there it looked abandoned. It didn’t just look like, you know, people were inside or out of town, it looked like the remains of a city after war.
Western North Dakota is really just like that though, a series of wheat and oil fields dotted with places like Epping, places like Zahl, places like Van Hook. It’s hard to believe there’s somewhere in the United States today with so few humans in it.
North Dakota is the third least populous state in the US and the fourth least in population density. There are more populated areas, even areas that are growing so rapidly that there aren’t enough homes — I know, I live in one — but there are less than ten people for every square mile of North Dakota territory. And trust me, when you live here — even in a place that seems crammed with people — you know it.
It’s Halloween! Which means it’s time for costumes and trick or treating and bobbing for apples and candy and me having to corral four dogs in order to open the front door and give a bunch of strange children fun size candy bars. More importantly, it’s time for horror movies. Let’s do a top five, shall we? We shall. And we shall shut up and like it. Spoilers! Don’t fight it… Just read…
OKAY. I’ve put this off for too long and I can’t take it anymore. I want to wrap up my Back to School with Judy Blume project before I forget everything about all eight of the books I read last month. I put it off because this is my 100th post! And I wanted to figure out a way to celebrate that! And probably give away some free shit!* But I came up with absolutely nothing. So here we are instead.
 I spent my September getting emotionally educated by the inimitable Judy Blume and eight of her teen and pre-teen protagonists. I learned some stuff! And I remembered some stuff! And I shared a whole bunch of personal details that probably no one in their right mind ever needed! That was my favorite part though, let’s be real.
Most of all, though, what I learned/remembered is that books are important. Books are important. Writing for young adults is profoundly important. If there’s one thing from my adolescence that most shaped me as a person it was reading, reading, reading, all the time, anywhere, at any moment. I always had a book in my bag and I probably actually started carrying a bag with me because I needed somewhere to put whatever book I wanted to carry around with me.
I had always been a big reader, since I learned to read (at four, my mother wanted me prepared for kindergarten) but my eighth grade English teacher was a particularly valuable element in my quest for the written word. She gave me Fahrenheit 451 and a slew of other books that changed me as a reader, made me more open, made me more aware, and made me better. She gave me Chris Crutcher and Robert Cormier. She gave me Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. And, had I been a bit younger or bit less obnoxious/aggressive as a human being, I think she probably would’ve given me Judy Blume too. She gave me access to the incredible library she’d built in her classroom and she took me seriously when I came to her to ask for more. (Hell, she even took me seriously when I did lyrical analysis of a Korn song.) She was a phenomenal teacher and an incredibly important part of my youth. She believed books and stories were important and she made sure that reading stayed with me, that school didn’t dig it out of me. I wouldn’t be a writer now, had she not nurtured me as a reader. I wouldn’t have an MFA. I wouldn’t tell stories. And without telling stories, without writing, I don’t know where I’d be. Thanks, Mrs. Wells.
Books are important. And going back to school with Judy Blume taught me why: We need to know we’re not alone. And Judy Blume is important because she wants young women — young people, but young women especially — to know that to their absolute core, to know in their hearts that no matter how isolated they feel or how weird they think they are, they are not alone.
It sounds like such a simple thing, but I think it’s one of the Great Purposes of Writing and it’s one for which I strive desperately. Why else would I share each and every thought that flitters across my consciousness? Why else would I blog? Why else would I read blogs? As much as I love reading stories and experiences that are unique to each of the people I follow, I think the medium transcends when you have a moment of “Oh! Oh, yes! Me too.” And I don’t really think books are all that different.
And Judy Blume’s books excel at those moments, they revel in them, they both whisper and shout them at readers. From being the subject of childhood cruelty to figuring out how your genitals work, Judy Blume is there to say, “Hey, you’re not a weirdo! There are lots and lots of us just like you!” And no matter how dated the details may be — sanitary napkin belts and Milwaukee braces that would never make it through a TSA checkpoint — that heartfelt relatability is the core of what makes Judy’s stories successful and timeless.
Being a kid — particularly one between 10 and 16 — is just horrid. It’s ugly and confusing and scary. Not just in a puberty way — zits and pubic hair and periods and boners are all weird, but we survive — but in a “I have no idea how to be a human being” way. You want to be cool and you want to be liked and you’re constantly struggling with desperately wanting to be older and not wanting it at all. It’s years of genuine misery and confusion, longer if you’re not lucky, and it all sucks so much. Adolescence will always be those things — gross and weird and scary and confusing — but lucky for lots of us Judy Blume was, is, and will be there to hold our hands through it.
And maybe through those scary bits of adulthood too.
In case you missed ’em:
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t
It’s Not The End of the World
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
Otherwise Known As Sheila the Great
Deenie
Blubber
Tiger Eyes*No, you absolutely cannot have my Judy Blume books.
Dear Judy,
I didn’t expect to like Tiger Eyes. I’m not sure why, honestly, and after the disappointment of Blubber earlier this week I was really, really dreading sitting down with it. But, like the dedicated person I am trying very hard to be, I sucked it up and I sat down with it and I devoured it. When I was reading Blubber, I had to bargain with myself to read it. I read five chapters and then got to watch fifteen minutes of an episode of Doctor Who. I set myself up for a similar bargain with Tiger Eyes, but it left the good Doctor utterly forsaken.
Tiger Eyes is really beautiful and painful and honest. It’s a lot more detached and literary than the last seven of yours I’ve read and I worried that it would start to feel like it was trying to hard, but it never did. I really loved Davey. I loved watching her struggle through her grief, but also her pushing back against the rigidity of her newfound household. The tension between a family that loves her and wants to keep her safe, to the point of overbearing protectiveness, and the overwhelming energy in Davey that desperately wants to run free.
I didn’t love Wolf or her interactions with him, but I loved her time with Mr. Ortiz and how gently she learns her lessons there, not only with grief but with the pressure of living up to expectations and wanting to please people who want the best for you, even if their idea of best is misguided.
I loved the little things in the story, the details of the landscape and the town, the meals and the people. I loved Davey asking to see the bathtub in Jane’s house and them sitting in the stranger’s Subaru in the parking lot of the movie theater. I really appreciated Davey’s acknowledgement of the racial tension in Los Alamos and Santa Fe and particularly her struggling with it because Atlantic City was so different. It’s not up to 2012 code of Not Being Racist, but it’s trying and I imagine it was up to 1981’s standards.
I don’t have a lot to say, Judy, I’m sorry. It’s easier to rant about something or rehash the nostalgia of something you know than it is to talk about things you just plain liked. I’m glad I got to spend the time with Davey and feel her pain and see her emerge from the dark cocoon of it. I’m glad I got to see her verbally, loudly, actively reject the values being laid on her by Bitsy and Walter. I’m glad I got to see her struggle with her mother and her mother’s pain. I’m really glad I got to see her seek help from Miriam and find the voice to talk about her loss. What a wonderful model that is for young readers who are often scared to ask for help when they most need it.
Thanks, Judy. This was an extraordinary way to finish this project.
– Ash
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
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