I Hope You Choke on Your Madeleine

I don't know if you buy books, but I used to. Now that I have a library card, I rent books.

Or I would rent books if any of the books I'd want to rent were in stock. They are often not in stock. There is no guarantee at the library like there is at Blockbuster.

It doesn't matter, anyway. Nowadays, all the new books by my supposed favorite authors are the same!

The same!

I use exclamation points sparingly, so when I mean they're all the same, they're really all the same!

Memoirs!

How I dread when my favorite novel writer eschews making up stuff to pen a book about himself. How self serving. How unprofessional. How blogger-esque!

That is not a winning plan!

I blame it all on Dave Eggers.

(Side note: At Wash U, Eggers handed out five-dollar bills to everyone who came to see his talk...but me. I am still bitter about that. It's not the money; it's the principal. I passed instead of pocketed, like Milton in "Office Space" during Lumberg's birthday party. I had to flex my combo sub that day. [Footnote to the side note: That last sentence was hilarious if you went to Wash U between 2000 and 2004.] So there is pent up frustration with Eggers. That, and after writing some decent books, we became a magazine editor. Lame.)

Eggers wrote a book about himself that was somewhat funny and sad but, like the New York Yankees or the Spanish Armada, did not live up to its billing. It wasn't really as good as everyone said it was.

Of the current New York Times best sellers, so many of them are memoirs. Alan Alda, Jerome Bettis, Princess Diana's butler, Josh Grogan (Marley & Me), Nora Ephron, Lou Holtz and Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle) all have tell-alls on the list.

What 20-something gives a rat’s ass (that’s the technical term for a “flying f*$@”) about a washed up actor stuffing his pet? He should have retired after M*A*S*H and live off royalties. And then he’s an Emmy-nominated actor on the West Wing?! Let someone else take the stage/write a book.

In other words, Alan Alda’s 15 minutes are up.

Of course there were memoirs before Dave Eggers. But no one my age read them before him. All of the above-mentioned people are 15 to 50 years older than me, and they've done a lot more in their lifetimes.

Eggers didn't do anything. Things just happened to him. He wrote a book about them. He got published. Then he becomes editor of fiction anthologies. (That last one is the kicker. And by "kicker," I mean its traditional definition. Not the "I need to show a cute animal in the last 30 seconds of my newcast" kicker. That's called a "kicker," too.)

Of course, they're making movies out of all these memoirs. "Running with Scissors" is out soon, based on the book with the same name. It's about a crazy psychiatrist taking care of someone else's kids.

When I bought the book, I thought it would be about, wait for it, "running with scissors." A "things-I-learned-growing up" book. With a sharp pair of shears playing a big role. (Note: I have not finished the book and have no plan to see the movie, so this panning of the book is based on having read only 1/5 of it.) Anyway, no scissors. Just some loony psych guy.

I've already met a loony psych guy. He was my prof freshman year for social psych. He said Wash "warsh," so he was as St. Louisian as toasted ravioli. He was unkempt like the lead in "Running with Scissors." So that was enough for me.

Speaking of St. Lunatics, Jonathan Franzen came out with a memoir. He wrote The Corrections and The Twenty-Seventh City. Those are two of my favorite novels. I was waiting years for his new book. And it's a memoir.

He’s not that old. He should be writing novels, but he chose to write a memoir.

I hope he chokes on his madeleine.

(If you don't get that, see "Little Miss Sunshine." If you still don't get it, look up Marcel Proust.)

You'll get it then. Just like Franzen should get it.

Whoops...

I've always thought I was good at math. So either for that reason, or because I had a P.E. teacher who liked to delegate, I was in charge of calculating a mile for the annual mile run at my elementary school.

Why?

The Presidential Challenge, that’s why!

You remember those tests.

Pull-ups, sit-ups, the mile run, the shuttle run, and the sit-and-reach. You reach one plateau, that's Presidential; a lesser plateau, that's National. You miss both plateaus, you appear on Dateline NBC as the "anonymous stomach" in the story on trans fat or the next diet craze from Dr. Atkins or his (living) surrogate.

I have six National patches in my house somewhere. Why? Because I couldn't reach my arms past my toes. This is not something that should haunt me, right?

But it does. Or it did, once, for a minute or two.

When? When during the only time in your life I had a one-on-one session with a personal trainer, I was told, "Gabe, you are the least flexible 23-year-old I have ever met!"

That was odd because, one, how many 23-year-olds does this 35-year-old personal trainer know? Is he the one taking out the girls my age? Or was he talking about the past? Didn’t people in the past have shorter legs, so that meant, they’d be better sit-and-reachers?

Back to the mile run in fifth grade.

At my elementary school in Nashville, we had four orange cones and the use of one huge park. I had to figure out how far apart to put the cones so that if we ran around them four times, we'd make a mile.

I added, multiplied and divided, and came up with answer.

Then I finished the course in 5 minutes and 49 seconds.

Whoops.

A 5:49 mile meant two things. Either I was the fastest fifth-grader in the state, or I made a math error.

I pushed my glasses up closer to my face, and thought: the latter.

But that meant 50 uncoordinated Jewish kids had to run around cones in the park...again. I was not so popular that day.

In my defense, my P.E. teacher’s method of cone-placement was based on the fact that she could stride exactly a yard 110 times in a row to place one cone, and then based on that cone, she’d figure out where to put the others.

Though I've come close, I have never to this day run a real mile in 5 minutes and 49 seconds.


(This blog is for Merav. What bettern day to give someone a shout out than his or her birthday. Happy 22, kid. I miss the way you like I miss Pedro Martinez. If you had baseball in your country, you'd understand just how much that is.)