Saturday in San Diego

I spent Mother’s Day weekend in San Diego. San Diego is great if you like the sun, ten-lane freeways, driving everywhere and walking nowhere, shopping malls, snapback hats, and flip flops. Definitely things that I can only take in small doses, except for the snapback hat, which I prefer no dose. Saturday was too hot and bright to be taking photos, except that the benches had hearts carved into them. After the weekend I came back to a feverish Berkeley suffering from another heat wave. Hey, you know what this reminds me of? Sometimes, I wish that I was the weather/ You’d bring me up in conversation forever/ And when it rained, I’d be the talk of the day.

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Post-Reading: Tell the Wolves I’m Home

In Tell the Wolves I’m Home, Finn Weiss keeps Joy of Cooking on a bookshelf in his kitchen. It is a ritual for him to pull it down and tap his finger on the cover, as if debating what to cook that night. However, the book has actually been hollowed out, and found inside are take-out menus from the best restaurants in New York City. “A different country every night.”
 
Tell the Wolves I’m Home follows fourteen-year-old June Elbus after she loses her best friend, the kind and brilliant Uncle Finn. The setting, New York during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, the troubled characters, and the suspense of so many unanswered questions had me rapt. As I previously noted, the details carry this story far; from a sarcastic black picture frame to a hollowed-out Joy of Cooking, beautiful details are everywhere. But (sorry, I know, that word…) it is as if the unanswered questions that kept me in suspense were far too big and complex for the story to ever match with the requisite big and complex answers. The story is truly stunning until it is time to resolve, and then it buckles under its own weight.
 
Greta Elbus, June’s sixteen-year-old sister, is a prime example of a complex question with a far too simple answer. Greta is beautiful and talented, the star of her high school’s production of South Pacific. She is also the most obvious villain of the book. Her treatment of Finn’s death and of June is shockingly cruel. As the story progresses, Greta deteriorates, with June describing her as vicious and manic. Greta becomes distant from her friends and begins to drink excessively, pouring vodka into her juice during breakfast. The reader is left in the dark as to what is causing her to behave this way.
 
Near the end of the book, the reader finally learns that Greta is jealous that June chose to spend more time with Finn than with her. Also, she is unlucky enough to be offered a “huge chance of a lifetime,” the opportunity to be in the Broadway production of Annie. Greta complains that she cannot believe she is “not supposed to be a kid anymore.” She wants to be “average” rather than “great.” I get that what is arguably trivial can seem devastating when you are a teenager, but the discrepancy between behavior and reason for behavior seemed far too extreme. This is only one example of the book’s tendency to offer incredibly simple answers to big questions.
 
In my preview of Tell the Wolves I’m Home, I declared that I was in the midst of a stunning read, and I was, and continued to be for most part. The shortfall described above is not enough to take away from the beauty of the book, mostly stemming from the impressive details. There is a scene when June goes down to Finn’s basement for the first time. In the basement, each tenant of Finn’s apartment building has a storage unit of the standard fare, with stacks of boxes sitting below a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. But not Finn’s storage unit. In place of a bare bulb hangs a crystal chandelier. There is an Oriental rug and a bookshelf filled with field guides to everything: seashells, gemstones, wildflowers, and trees. The story behind why the “annex” exists in the first place is both heartwarming and heartbreaking, like so much of what happens in Tell the Wolves I’m Home. And trust me on the details.

On Blue Hour

After a week-long heat wave Berkeley settled into its cool and breezy self. I crossed these tracks during blue hour, a time made memorable by Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. You can read her description of blue hour here.
 
I’ve lived in Berkeley for almost two years. Most young people land here because they’ve been accepted into UC Berkeley. They spend four years here and then take small leaps into nearby cities like Oakland or San Francisco. I moved to this collegiate hub a couple years after spending my own four years at UCLA. My velcro-fastened acceptance letter from UC Berkeley offered spring admission, which felt like a backhand compliment, like being invited to a party on the condition that you show up several hours late. As there is only so much food, drink, and room on the dance floor, you may arrive only after the other guests have settled in, only after enough of those guests have departed early.
 
UCLA gave me the the opportunity to live in Los Angeles and love it because I didn’t have to deal with the discomforts that would make me hate it. Admittedly, my version of LA is skewed because my travels were limited to where my feet and the bus could take me. Given that my everyday revolved around campus, I saw no utility in owning a car in a city that vows to make driving a miserable experience. “Driving” is putting it far too kindly, as what LA traffic actually requires is that you sit in your motionless car, surrounded on all sides by other motionless cars. As the exhaust slips in to mix with the stale air blowing from your AC, you unwillingly gaze at a sky littered with billboards of famous people and their movies. If I did that every day I would become anxious thinking about how much time I spend not getting anywhere. A quarter-life-crisis in driving form. It leads to daydreams of using my feet to traverse sidewalks, swimming in the color blue. Berkeley is lovely. But Joan Didion promises there’s nothing like blue hour in New York.