2012 Book Count: 22

For SN, with thoughtful thoughts.

The first I had ever really heard of David Foster Wallace was from a book review of The Pale King by Laura Miller over at Salon.com. And as I like most things that she likes, I thought it should give it a go.

And then I got very intimidated. Something that hadn’t happened to me since my first go around with Pride and Prejudice when I was 13. This was a book for Serious Readers.

So I thought I would start with another book – an earlier one. So I tried Infinite Jest. And two chapters in I felt even more confused and slightly weirded out than before (not to mention both of those books are oh so long. Very, very long). So poor DFW slipped from “want” to “should” read, and his books just sort of became titles in my eBook Reader that (I thought) made me look very super smart.

Then one day I was hanging out in the near proximity to a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It was slighter than the other books of DFW’s that I had seen in real dead-tree form, and it didn’t give me the impression that it would cause any kind of permanent damage to anyone should I accidentally drop it on them. I was informed by it’s owner that it was one of the subjects for study in an Experimental Literature class – otherwise known as ‘the class about (jet) black humour’. Then he and I had a discussion about DFW in which I pretended to know way more about him and his works than I really did*.

But every time I was around this book, I couldn’t help but to pick it up and open to a random page and read for a bit. And every time I did this, I liked it more and more until I seriously considered stealing it.

I lost access to that particular copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. And for a short while I stopped thinking about DFW. But the time comes, as it does, when I finished a book rather sooner than I expected, and while flipping through my eBook titles for my next victim I stumbled back upon him, and I remembered. So I closed my eyes and jumped. Three pages in I felt my life change.

Consider the Lobster is a collection of DFW’s essays from the early 2000′s. And much like my first experience with Christopher Isherwood, I felt like I knew the person on the other side of the words. A person so smart, and so funny, and so achingly aware of everything around him that he makes it feel to me like being smart and funny is the only way to cope with having the sneaking suspicion that he could see clearly into the way the universe’s clockworks tick along and finding that idea monumentally terrifying.**

From then on out I resented pretty much every minute I wasn’t reading.

Consider the Lobster also has an essay about English Usage which is disguised as a review of a dictionary – or rather, a review of a dictionary/usage guide that turned into an essay on the modern English Usage Wars; a bit of writing about John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign so truthful it hurt me (for Rolling Stone, no less); why Kafka is funny and why American college students just don’t get it (not really their fault); and the titular essay – Consider the Lobster – about the Main Lobster Festival and how dialing up your sensitivity a  notch makes the whole thing seem somewhat ethically nauseating.

So, just like when I started reading Isherwood, Auden, and Spender, I felt like I had made a new friend. That I knew this person, and that I should probably really call him up and take him out for coffee and maybe some fresh air – because who knows what he’s getting up to on his own. And then I remembered something terrible from that Salon article that I had read so long ago.

David Foster Wallace is dead.

It was the  main thrust of the article, actually. The Pale King was incomplete at Wallace’s death and was finished by his editor based on notes and outlines. Wallace succumbed to a battle with chronic depression and committed suicide on September 12th, 2008.

I felt like I had just watched something beautiful gunned down in the street. I am still grieving for the future that I will never have with David Foster Wallace. All the experiences I can possible have of his writing, of his magical brain, are contained in three novels, three collections of short stories and a few dozen essays. I will never find out what he thought about Barack Obama’s presidency. I will never find out what he thought about growing old. I will never experience the next experience he felt worthy of recreating as an epic (and heavy) work of fiction.

So when I pick up his next book, I know that I have only a finite amount of time left with DFW. I’m not sure if it makes me feel more precious about his works or if from here on out I’ll be experiencing everything coloured by an innocuous bit of rope somewhere in a house on September 12, 2008.

But what I hope will happen is that I will always think of the experience I first had – that amazing high when you feel like you’ve met a brain just like yours, and that – rather than being boring – finding out that you like all the same things is thrilling and everything is more interesting when he says it. I’m going to hold on to that, and I’m going to enjoy.

*This is practically a sport for people like me.

**The particular article that inspired all these feelings was about porn, actually. He’s that good.

2012 Book Count: 16

Norwegian Wood

Well, this is my first foray into the project I was thinking about not too long ago, which was writing in English about books I read in Japanese.

This is technically a re-read, but I’m including it on the 2012 Book Count because my language skills are a whole world of better compared to my first go through that it was almost like reading another book*. I’ve compromised by just counting it as one book, though, even though it is broken into two: the Red Book and the Green Book.

Norwegian Wood (named for the Beatles Song) was Murakami Haruki’s first huge hit in Japan, especially with the younger crowds. It was published in 1987 and had a giant following. In fact, people would wear red or green tee-shirts to display which book was their favourite.

The story takes place in the later bit of the sixties (in Japan, naturally) and follows the first few years of university life of Toru Watanabe (Watanabe-kun to his friends), still hurting from his best friend Kizuki’s suicide a few years earlier. The main meat of the story, however, is Watanabe’s relationship with the two women in his life: Naoko, Kizuki’s girlfriend, and Midori, a classmate.

Death hangs heavy over quite a lot of the novel. Naoko is the only other person who is more damaged by Kizuki’s suicide than Watanabe, and the two go on a sort of healing journey by going on long, mostly silent walks every Sunday. It doesn’t take very very long for Watanabe to fall desperately in love with her, and her subsequent mental breakdown only makes him commit ever more strongly to her. He refuses to abandon her as be believes Kizuki did, and longs to be a healing influence in her life.

To whom Watanabe is actually a healing influence on, though, is Midori. Midori is silently (though more often than not also loudly) resentful of the fact that she has had to care for herself throughout her whole childhood, and as soon as any kind of adulthood began for her, care for her sick parents. Watanabe is basically just an incredibly decent human being to her (he goes and sits with her sick father while she blows off some steam, and then volunteers to do it again, something that she never even imagined another person would ever think of doing for her), and, at first unknowingly, cares for her in the way that she always wanted, and which Naoko is unable to accept from him.

The various push/pull/give/take dynamics of the book are incredibly fascinating. They haunted my mind for a week after finishing the book, and sitting down to write this I thought of several more, all of which have me in awe of the powers of Murakami. Everything is incredibly beautifully and powerfully executed. There are some sentances that hit you so hard it is like being kicked in the stomach, and others that wash over you in the most warm and comfortable way. The comparisons between Naoko and Midori, Kizuki and Nagasawa-san (a somewhat contemptible friend that Watanabe makes in his dorm), optimism and pessimism, and finally red and green.

That Murakami chose to separate his book as he did fascinates me endlessly. The first book, the Red Book, the situation is positive and things go well for Watanabe and those around him, but he himself is a little dour. The second book, the Green Book, is characterized by Watanabe’s world going to shit, but he himself being able to draw on a powerful internal optimism.

What got me to re-read Norweigan Wood in the first place was going to see the movie adaptation that recently came out. Looking back on the film after re-reading the book, it is interesting to compare the story as a single narrative (the movie) and the broken one (the book). The more I think about the breaking of the book into two parts, the more I think it was because Murakami really wanted to drive the idea of the separateness of the two situations that evolve for Watanabe home. You know when you put down one and pick up the other that there is an incredibly tangible divide created not only in the way the story turns, but also in the very physical act of reaching over to find the next book, open it to the correct page, and begin the journey all over again. The follow through narrative of the movie is definitely more subtle, but it seems to me that subtle was not exactly what Murakami was going for. There are plenty of beautifully subtle nuances in the writing, but breaking up the story as he did into two separate physical objects seems to be too big a gesture to be ignored.

Something I’m noticing about writing in English about something I read in Japanese is that I feel like it’s a lot easier to write about it on a more emotional level than I can with a book I’ve read in English. That is where the translation lies, I think – in nameless emotional response that has no proper language. Or maybe I am just being sentimental**. It is, after all, an incredibly emotional book – something that was uniquely different from popular Japanese literature at the time, thus endearing it so completely to a younger generation.

This book is widely available in an English translation, and though I’ve never read it to compare, I would highly recommend this book. Even if the ebb and flow of the undercurrents don’t make it through, the story of Watanabe, Naoko, and Midori is so beautiful that I would never want to deprive it of anyone. Go forth and be touched.

*For example: I didn’t know a whole lot of sexy words, so I totally missed out on more than one hot sex scene.

**Probably far more likely, actually.

Q1 Book Count: 15

Compared to last year, that is actually kind of a poor showing. Q1 for 2011 finished at 24 – for a difference of 9 books. That feels pretty significant, but I think we can lay the blame directly on Mr. George RR Martin and his 1000 page behemoth tomes for that. At least, that’ s what I’m going for, anyway. When in doubt, blame it on George. Also: I was unemployed for January 2011, and the count for that month is 11. So I won’t take it too hard.

Literature*: 6

1. The Painter of Battles by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, January 18

3. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan January 24

4. We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver January 27

5. The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis January 30

6. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino February 3

15. The Heart is a Lonley Hunter by Carson McCullers March 28

The ones that really stuck out for me in this list was We Need to Talk about Kevin, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, neither of which I have written about. I have, however, started something on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, so expect to see that in a little while. I felt really personal about both of these books. We Need to Talk about Kevin was especially so – I’m still having a little trouble formulating my thoughts about it. Both very powerful reads.

Mystery: 1

7. Graveyard for Lunatics by Ray Bradbury February 15

Oh Ray Bradbury – you are so wonderful with your Science Fiction and also your mystery stories! As I wrote in this one, it was just superb. I can’t wait to read the rest of his mysteries.

Science Fiction: 4

2. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury January 22

8. Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller February 18

9. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlen February 21

14. The Island of Doctor Moreau by HG Wells March 20

The winner for this one is obviously The Martian Chronicles. Good old Ray again, bein’ awesome. I do really, really love this one, and I think it’s a must read for everyone regardless of how you feel about science fiction.

Fantasy: 4

10. A Clash of Kings by George RR Martin February 26

11. A Storm of Swords by George RR Martin March 3

12. A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin March 5

13. A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin March 15

We all know about these and how they pretty much ruined my life for half a month. Le Sigh. Darn satisfying storytelling, however, and completely addictive. This is my new vampire fiction. I will let you know when I finally get around to watching the show – right now I don’t think my heart could take it.

So that’s what happened in Q1. I think that there are some really solid books in there, certainly nothing I regret. Not even The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I hope to keep up the ‘quality vs quantity’ trend for Q2, but watch out!

*By “Literature” I mean anything that isn’t too genre heavy. It’s all literature, but they are all novels, also, so I just stick with that term. Forgive me.

As with many of my favourite things, I found out about it on the marvelous and often mentioned tor.com, and pretty much went directly from that article to the ‘buy a reasonably priced subscription’ page of their website.

The joys of this magazine are two-fold: the first is that you get a lot of really quality short fiction in your letter box once a quarter. The second is that you get a very beautiful art object in your letter box once a quarter. I’ve never had the heart to recycle an issue, and it’s entirely possible I might bare my fangs and hiss at you if you ever ask to borrow one**.

The wonderful thing that makes it an art object is that every issue has a guest designer, and seeing as how the whole thing is the brain child of Mr. Francis Ford Coppola (Seriously. And all the ads are just for that wine he makes, that’s it. Unless he’s branched out to champagne, then there will be one of those too), the list of designers is rather illustrious. Think big. Like David Bowie. So each issue is different in the most delightful ways.

Coming to think of it, seeing as how I doubt that Mr. Coppola pays to have his own wine advertised in his own magazine, I wonder that it survives at all, not to mention being fairly reasonably priced. I think it must help that he is terribly rich. In fact, just paging through the magazine makes me feel terribly rich.

But the fiction is very, very high quality. Like don’t even bother submitting unless you are on the best seller list kind of high quality. So it is both incredibly enjoyable and improving to any one like me with any kind of vague literary aspirations.

So, go forth and give it a look. It’s available where ever fine magazines are sold (or Chapters). And if anyone from Zoetrope is reading this, I am more than happy to write more marvelous things about your publication in exchange for a free lifetime subscription. It wouldn’t even be a hardship.

*It started off as Christmas presents when I was a child (the very first one was gifted to me at about ten years old, and was a picture of a lion inside a Christmas card. For a few moments I thought was going to get a new pet) and then just became a $20 a year habit. These days I don’t have a current subscription, but I do troll thrift stores for any issues from the 1970′s, which is my favourite era of National Geographic photography. I cut all the pictures out and file them. For later.

**I may let you read one under my supervision, though I might demand a hostage first.

But then I started, as I am wont to do, Thinking More About It, and I realized that during my career as a reader, these lists haven’t been so static as I had thought they were in the heat of the moment. What follows are some obvious examples.

One Was Enough: Good example for me is The Hunger Games. I read and enjoyed The Hunger Games, but felt more or less completely content with just looking of the synopses of the following two books. I think this is mostly due to the fact that as far as dystopian young adult fiction goes, I started when I was actually a young adult and had read things like it before. I am, however, immensely glad that these books are in the world, teaching girls to be completely kick-ass. The reason that they have been relegated to the ‘should’ read list, though, instead of just fading off my radar, is that there is a lot of incredibly intelligent writing going on right now about them (go see pretty much every other post over at tor.com, and especially this one), and you all know how I hate to be left out. So they linger on my eReader, waiting.

One Wasn’t Enough: This happens to me when I ‘discover’ (read: blunder upon something that everyone else knew about forever but I was too stuck in a fantasy novel series to notice) a ‘new’ genre and am over come with the immensely powerful desire to know everything about it. Cyberpunk was a lot like this for me. I read a Cyberpunk novel and all of a sudden I had a burning, urgent need that I read Neuromancer by William Gibson, something that had been on my ‘should’ list for quite some time because it’s obvious parallels to things like The Matrix, etc. This generally has the oposite effect of the previous sceneario: a month of binge reading.

Broccoli: Sometimes I just suck it up and eat my broccoli because it is good for me. Needless to say, this is a somewhat rare occurance which generally involves a friend lending me a book that has been stuck in the slow lane of the to read pile for longer than I’d care to admit and I would really like to return it to them without having to lie.

For a Real Live Scholarly Endeavor: I once embarked on a reading project because Vladimir Nabokov told me a it was a good idea. Basically I was going to read all the novels he wrote about in his Lectures on Literature for Columbia University and follow them with his commentary. The first couple were a breeze, mostly because I had read them and enjoyed them already, but then we came to Madame Bovary, which I loathed and ended up skipping the last third. Mr. Nabokov did tell me later that I disliked it for the right reasons, and even though it wasn’t really that comforting, I took a deep breath and started Swann’s Way by Proust. My relationship with Mr. Nabokov has altered perceptably.

Getting a Little More Damned Mature: Funnily enough, an example for this one isn’t readily jumping to mind. I do try, however, not to get too attached to my prejudices, because one day I am sure to pick a naval adventure novel (or, heaven forbid, a romance novel) and enjoy it. But I am only human, and if you speak to me of this possibility I will probably wrinkle my nose and bestow upon you a look of utter distain before I start ignoring you completely.

2012 Book Count: 14

Confession: I’ve never actually read anything by HG Wells before this.

Shocking, I know. And not a little bit embarrassing. But the ice has been broken, so let’s move on.

The Island of Doctor Moreau reminded me, rather un-originally, of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (one of my favourites). The interesting distinction is, of course, that the creation of Frankenstein’s Creature can be, in essence, considered an accident – or certainly an unexpected result of his research that Frankenstein came to deeply regret. Moreau, however, creates his creatures because he wants to, and more importantly because he can. Once they lose his interest, he discards them to live out a year or so of miserable existence in the wilderness before they die as a result of their altered anatomy. Where Frankenstein has but the one Creature, Moreau created sixty-three of his “Beast People”, and if he had not been prevented, he would have blithely continued on making more and more.

Moreau is a pretty horrible person and beyond unethical as scientist. He experiments on animals, and part of his process is exposing them to incredible pain. He thinks that the spiritually and mentally advanced don’t need feel pain (he, bizarrely, stabs himself in the leg to prove this point), so, and I’m extrapolating and paraphrasing, that if you can feel pain, then you probably deserve it for being slightly less than human. The idea that it is perhaps bad to hurt animals is something that has never occurred to him, and you get the idea that he would probably die laughing if you suggested it to him.

But while Moreau is particularly awful, it was the protagonist, Edward Prendick, that spent a lot of time confusing me. It’s like he doesn’t really know what to feel for the Beast People - he spends a lot of time wobbling back and forth. He never quite gets over feeling totally creeped out by them (though spending some months with them alone cures him of that a little), but he is also very aware that what Moreau has done to them is completely cruel and unusual. Prendick does, however, have the decency to feel bad that he finds listening to the animals being tortured unbearable, but that the moment he has been removed from the evidence it stops bothering him. He has more sympathy for their situation than he does for them; he is constantly maintaining that he is superior to the Beast People – that while they are human-like, they are not people, and without the cultural influence of Moreau and his terrifying experiments to keep them in line, they gradually revert back to their animal instincts, which becomes even more distressing to him as he watches them degenerate day by day.

One of the larger differences between Frankenstein’s Creature and Moreau’s Beast People is that the Beast People don’t have any wish to revenge themselves on Moreau. They are completely terrified of him and his “House of Pain”, and the only way they lose that fear is by watching Moreau die. Then they go from dogs shrinking away from being kicked to bears rummaging the trash of suburban neighborhoods. They simply leave behind their fear and start to live as they had before Moreau – as their true animal selves. The tragedy of their situation is, however, that they have been so physically altered that they can never truly return to being animals completely – they must continue to lead half-lives in pain and misery.

When Prendick is finally rescued, he finds that he himself has been altered – not physically, but the trauma of Moreau’s island marked him so irrevocably that he must take himself away from people that he is constantly suspecting of really being animals about to turn on him.

This was a really odd book for me, which I am pretty sure has to do with the fact that I am reading this for the first time in 2012. I believe that this book caused quite a great stir in 1896 when it was first published, but today it just made me feel a little weird. I think one of the things that confuses my twenty-first century brain is its lack of heroics. This sort of story now-a-days would be filled with a passionate lead that would sacrifice and yell to the sky for the rights of the Beast People. This story is filled with real people, though, and real people, for the most part, aren’t like that – they are more concerned, like Prendick, with removing themselves from the source of the discomfort, rather than becoming the change that they wish to see.

2012 Book Count: 9

This book made me somewhat… uncomfortable, and I can’t decide if it was in a good way or a bad way. It is undoubtedly a Great Book with a pretty thrilling story, and has won scads of awards, but there is something about it that is still bugging me a little, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It’s a story about the struggle of independence of the Lunar Colony (“Luna”) from Earth – specifically Luna’s cruel governing body, the Authority – in the year 2075. This book definitely has all my love almost solely for the society that Mr. Heinlein created on Luna – it’s pretty great and feels very true to life. It was originally a type of penal colony – a sci-fi Australia – where convicts from Earth are shipped to farm and mine. There is a dearth of women on Luna, so several systems of polyandrous marriage are the norm (one wife having at least two husbands – there are several different systems described in the book, and all of them are pretty much awesome), and their entire culture is shaped around their unforgiving environment. I loved the setting, and I loved the characters – especially their sentient computer, Mike, who is their secret and best advantage in dealing with Earth.

Mike is a bit like Commander Data from Star Trek TNG (read: pretty adorable), and I love him, but he is also one of the bigger uncertainties I have with the book. Mike (named for Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft) is Luna’s central computer, and our narrator, Mannie, a one armed computer technician, posits that after many years of having more and more components added on to him and more and more access and processing power given to him that he “woke up”. Mike controls pretty much everything on Luna, from banking to telecommunications to space travel and shipping. Having him on your side is having God in your corner. Naturally he has limitations, but he’s the most powerful computer, not to mention the only sentient one, on both planets, so when he joins in the fun it feels like a forgone conclusion that the rebels are going to triumph. Though, that conclusion is also pretty easily reached by the tone and hints that Mannie drops while narrating the story – as he is telling the story as it happened from a point in the future.

It’s a pretty fun story, but something underneath it just didn’t sit right with me. But the more I think about it, the more I believe that those feelings say more about me than the premise of the book itself. I come from a country that has universal health care and free schools and a more or less democratically elected government – whereas the citizens of Luna pay a monthly fee to breathe. So naturally the idea of paying taxes seems kind of insulting to them. On Luna you get what you pay for, and the only thing that is standing between you and getting shoved out an air lock into open space is your reputation as a fair and good person. I keep reminding myself that of course it would be a pretty horrible way to live in the here and now, and that the only place the kind of society like Heilein is proposing can, literally, only exist on the moon.

Anyway, the internet told me that the second season was going to start in April. So naturally the first thing I go and do is read the second book, thinking for sure I’ll get on the bandwagon this time.

That was sixteen days ago.

I am now 70% through book number five. I’ve read them back to back, each averaging at about 900 pages. Book Five is 1100.

I would have finished it two days ago, except I had to play of “I can stop whenever I want to” chicken with myself, which ended today when not even a rousing game of Dr. Mario could stop me from getting my fix.

I’m a bit frightened about what is gong to happen to me when I finally get through the last four hundred pages. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I fear the withdrawal will be severe. I’ll probably chew my fingers off or something.

So: If you are looking to lose sixteen days of your life, George RR Martin is there to help you out. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

2012 Book Count: 7

Still loving Ray Bradbury. What a fantastic, fantastic writer.

A Graveyard for Lunatics isn’t one of his science fiction/fantasy novels, however. It’s a mystery story – and we all know how I feel about mystery stories.  The thing with this novel which so impressed me, however, was how he wrote it. When you looked at the events and the plot, it was a straight forward mystery with bad guys and good guys and suspects and secret passages – a beginning, middle, and end. But somehow Mr. Bradbury has managed to write this book as though it were magical realism. It took me a while to look past the fantastic and realize that there was a more than familiar structure underneath. It’s hard to explain. Everyday events become seeped through with a magical importance, so that a ride in a car is not a transport from a to b, but rather a noble quest filled with significance and metaphor and beauty, while never become pretentious or boring.

The story takes place mostly in a film studio and in a graveyard – conveniently located next door to each other. Blackmail and murder are afoot, or, at least our protagonist believes that they are, the crimes themselves have the curious habit of vanishing before they can be closely inspected.

Both the movie studio and the graveyard are inherently magical places. The movie studio can be any place in any country on the earth, and frequently is. The graveyard is filled with mystery and plots (of both varieties). The movie studio has magic in the fact that it never stops changing, and the graveyard has magic in its stasis. In the movie studio the secrets are buried and hidden away – in the graveyard they are obscured simply for being out in plain sight.

Mr. Bradbury does a really wonderful job in showing us that magic is really in our perception. The characters all see the world as  being alive with metaphor and allegory, and it’s with this that they create – in fact, there is really only one non-creative character in the novel, and that is the detective, whose role is mostly to keep everyone else grounded in the reality of the danger that the situation represents, something that is generally summarily disregarded by everyone else.

I relished every word of this book, and the moments in which I was prevented from reading it (damn you, responsible adult job!), were pretty agonizing. I forgot about most of the mystery until the very end because I was so enchanted with the writing and the characters themselves and how they saw the world around them – saw through the sets and costumes to the wonder and magic beneath them, that disguises were not necessarily to obscure what one really was, but to be something different, if you were lucky.

But enough gushing! This is an incredibly worthy bit of literature. I’ve had to resist the temptation to go round to all the used book stores and buy all the copies to distribute as a public service. Go forth and enjoy.

So if I really liked all five of you who regularly read this site, I would write more about things that I hate. It would make for much more varied and entertaining reading, I’m pretty sure.

Except there is one problem: Life is Short. Too short, in fact, to read stupid books.*

Unless you are being paid to do so. Which I am not.**

So: I will do my  best to continue and be as interesting as possible, but I don’t foresee any real drastic changes in my reading habits. How many different ways can I say “I really liked this book”? I bet more than one, seeing as how I am reasonably clever, and from this point on I am on a quest to find them. Because I do read lots of books, and lot of interesting and different books, so you would think that I would find interesting and different things to say about them. I think I’ve just gotten really good and spotting what it is that I like. Hopefully you also like what I like, otherwise I have no idea what you are doing here, reading this.***

So anyway: personal challenge, blah blah blah.

Bear with me, please and thank you.

*This is an amazing life lesson. You’re welcome.

**I am, however, totally open to being paid. kaileykailey@kaileykailey.ca, if you’re interested. I also like free things.

***Unless you are my enemy, in which case I applaud your cunning and guile to learn about me in this way. Except that it is all lies. All of it.