Book Club

I always wanted to join a book club. There are so many scenes in movies with men and women sitting in cozy rooms huddled over a book. The conversation is smart, funny and yet it is a conversation between friends. The book at hand is a very good pick. It might be an old classic or a more recent cult sensation; in any case the book has been picked after much consideration.

More recently there have been entire movies about book clubs - the Jane Austen Book Club for one. And I am impressionable :). Who says that TV is bad for our imagination? So I joined a book club that met 3 miles from here, had great ratings with lots of members leaving behind posts about how varied the opinions were, how lively the conversation was and so on. What could possible go wrong? We would pick a good book, gather in some cozy restaurant and chat away.

As always when you build things up they are bound to let you down. So when the book that was chosen did not meet my expectations I blamed my rather steep expectations. We picked Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. I have nothing against David Sedaris and I rather enjoyed the book but it was just not what I expected from a book club.

Things looked up a little after that. The book club seemed quite organized, I got reminder mails, comments and also a list questions that would aid discussion. So though I did not think that the book in itself lent itself to much analysis or discussion I thought with a bunch of irreverent, funny people this would be good. They did pick a very politically incorrect, laugh out loud kind of book and if that says anything about them, I expected a fun bunch of people.

Since it was my first book club meeting ever, it was clearly not enough for me just to read the book. I have spent a large portion of my life taking examinations and now I worked on converting a leisure activity to something that resembled an examination. I made notes about the questions asked, googled other details of interest, jotted down salient points. Three weeks after I had RSVP'd, I turned up at the designated time at a Panera Bread where a table had been booked for our meeting.

When I met the crowd I was not exactly elated. There were 7 women and 2 men all of whom avoided any eye contact or pleasantries. A couple of them seemed to know each other but that was about it. Things went downhill rather quickly... With the exception of two women most of the people there had either not read the book, or read it so long ago that they did not remember the details, or had read so many of Sedaris' books that they had no idea what this particular one said. Great start!!

I tried to cling to my mental picture of lively conversation, cozy rooms but this situation was past help. The questions were read out and everything contributed their half a cent (I give 2 cents to an entire sentence). I tried to contribute however the discussion was not what I had hoped for. One question dealt with coming up with the cast of a movie based on the book. David Sedaris is a self absorbed, funny, intelligent man who was a former drug addict, abused alcohol and spent most of his life without any goals. I had given this much thought and decided that Hugh Grant would play this role well. The group there however had decided because David Sedaris was gay, the person who would do this character most justice was Sean Hayes a very gay character in Will and Grace. That is like casting Kal Penn in every Indian role including Tipu Sultan and Gandhi. All in all we got through the list of questions very quickly. Clearly all my homework was to go to waste.

The conversation then got worse. There were two teachers and they began talking about their job. One was a female teacher who talked a lot about an 11 year old who just had sex on her mind. She of course dropped to a whisper every time she said the S word but the impression I got was that this teacher also clearly had "sex" on her mind. The other teacher also talked about the hell his students were going through. There were stories about overdoses, homelessness, and violence. The two teachers then spent considerable amount of time coming up with the most shocking story of the evening.

There was also a girl who kept talking about how she loved self help books. Having done my research I knew that David Sedaris had kicked his drug/ tobacco/ alcohol habits with the help of self help books. Though this was a commendable feat, if David Sedaris talked about said self books in excruciating detail with every passing acquaintance stuck in an hour long book club meeting, I don't think I will ever read a book authored by him again.

After the first 10 minutes when I was trying to at least trying to answer some of the questions, I gave up and stared at the people with growing amazement. Yet another dream shattered. My mental pictures of hot cocoa, fireplaces, and lovely books replaced with this- what was effectively a retelling of a trashy reality show.

And to add salt to my fresh wounds apart from one English teacher not one of them had heard of Agatha Christie. :(

new things

After the end of my grad school days I find I have more and more time on my hands.Four years of engineering followed by a couple of years in the software industry followed by a couple of years in grad school has left me ill prepared for all this leisure. Hang on now I am not claiming I spent all that time studying / working just that when I was not working / studying the guilt of not doing those things always hung over my head. My leisure time was so taken up by things that had a very very small learning curve like well movie watching, some books, more movie watching.....

And now with my much reduced ambition, money I don't have to put away for next term fees, and ALL THIS TIME there are just so many things I want to do. So many. I have no memory of my childhood failures, no idea of what I am good at or not. Also the stress involved is so much reduced now. There is no fiendishly talented / athletic younger sibling who is definitely going to take up whatever you take up immediately after you and then make it look so easy that the only way out is to pretend not be interested anymore. No cheering parents whose hopeful, bright, proud faces makes you wish you had practiced before starting this new thing. My dad after buying the two of us tennis rackets told the story of how steffi graf had taken up tennis at 4 and how 7 was fine for me.  Needless to say I "lost interest" in tennis and stuck with stappu, dark room and chain chain as a way to spend my evenings. At that time these were not competitive sports (I am not certain that this is still the case considering the last Olympics). 

So flush with all this time and up to brim with enthusiasm I am reliving my failures as a child all over again.

Things I have tried/ aimed to accomplish in the past couple of years

- Learn to write/ read tamil. The plan of course was to devour all the tamil classics immediately

- run a half marathon .. I could run upto 4 miles but then I realized I just run so that I am really hungry and eat without guilt. NOT marathon material.

- learn to crochet - did not open the learn to crochet kit till it was caught in my vaccum and had to be thrown away

- learn to snow board - this was very very painful. My husband has not given up on this yet and it might just be a question of years before I forget the pain of the experience and get back there.

- build a shelf from wood - OK so this was a little out there... but in my defence it was a LOT of leisure time and there are some amazing how to videos on youtube.

- learn to ski - this one showed promise.. thank my very patient husband who tolerated my cursing in Tamil  and smiled with me while I grinned foolishly and shouted "this is great" for all the non Tamil speakers to hear.

- learn yoga - this was OK... but not high learning curve activity since everything i did learn was medium in complexity

- practice paranayama until my mind is completely alert, my sleep in totally dreamless and my complexion radiant from all that oxygen. - I practice pranayama intermittently but my approach is more damage control...

- learn to paint - this is the new one. I have spent the last couple of months picking art for my walls and staring at the many beautiful paintings and all that talent out there has left me thirsting to put some colour down on paper. When I was 7 I would break into a cold sweat in drawing class and try to creep by in my making a copy albeit poorer of what the more gifted kids were making ( one prachi aggarwal - her bright red house looked so vibrant and my version looked like a very inexpensively produced Japanese anime snapshot). I think about that and yet I want to paint and believe I can. Is this wisdom or has senility set in early? 

I have also planned to re stain my coffee tables, sand and refinish my shelves, make a stain glass painting on my glass top dining table, read the vedas, read the upanishads, learn Spanish.

If I do continue writing this blog I am sure these and many other failed or partly successful attempts will find there way into the blog entries... Though I doubt even a written record is going to stop me from repeating these mistakes again when I am say 40... I think I might remember to stick to the bunny slopes if I try snowboarding again.