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Unbearable Lightness is Porta de Rossi’s 2010 memoir of the dark and difficult events of 1998 and 1999 when she joined the cast of Ally McBeal. It has been sitting on my e-reader (i.e., iPhone) for a while and I cracked into it in the fall as a stimulating activity to stave off falling asleep during my commuter train ride to and from work.

I watched my fair share of Ally McBeal because my sister watched it but I did not really enjoy it. As one who takes things way too literally, I did not enjoy the fantasy sequences that dominated the narrative and I only paid more attention when Lucy Liu became a regular and this brilliant man-eating ice queen character with beautiful blonde hair also joined the cast. I paid more attention to the tabloids wherein Calista Flockhart was regularly flogged in the press for her ultra-slight figure and then we heard that other people on set (Courtney Thorne-Smith and Portia) were getting really thin, speculated because they had to “keep up”. Next thing I knew, Portia de Rossi came out and stepped out with Ellen DeGeneres and that brings us to today! Apparently Portia had really great gigs on Arrested Development and Better Off Ted.

Unbearable Lightness starts with the end of Portia’s marriage and the beginning of her time on Ally McBeal. An Australian model-turned-actress with a slim acting reel at that time, she’s insecure about joining a hot show and constantly questions why they would want her. Years of being in the modeling world resulted in her self-worth being tied to standing out, being considered special, and that always seemed to include being thin. She goes back to her days in high school and modeling days when her glamorous modeling did the job of setting her apart but also instilled in her the habits of eating, purging, and crash dieting. When she joined Ally McBeal, she was not yet ready to come out, partly because she was joining as a hot sex symbol. Meanwhile, Ellen was out, Portia read Betty DeGeneres’ memoir Love, Ellen, and Portia sees Ellen a role model. Her publicist and marketing people spin a different story, projecting Portia as naive-come-icon who had it all together. For example, the press made it out as if Portia gave up a career in law to act (which fit well with her role on a legal dramedy) while in reality she wasn’t that directional in her life choices. While the novel is about her long journey to self-acceptance, you also get a glimpse behind-the-scenes of the hit show and the beginning of Portia and Ellen’s relationship. For someone who doesn’t devour tabloids, it was a refreshing point of view into things otherwise so public.

Apparently I didn’t watch Ally much and did not know that Portia de Rossia stands at the height of 5’7″ (170 cm); rather I thought she was around 5’3″. So when she moaned about hitting 130 lbs, I naively nodded in agreement that she needed to shed some weight to be in line with her industry perhaps; afterall, aren’t those 6-foot tall models who look like sticks just 110 lbs? At first, Portia’s obsession about food was cute and quirky and someone who sticks so steadfast to discipline and deprivation is admirable as a “perfectionist” with the ultimate self-control. It is, for a moment, more comfortable for her deprive herself than hear about what she at during a binge. As the obsession grew, her writing voice changed to one irrational and sounding very much like petulant adolescent. Ultimately, in the final chapter, it was really sad because she had reach a goal weight of under 100 lbs (as low as 82 lbs) and she was still miserable and, by then, very sick. The road to recovery is slow and painful because the ego needs to be mended and it can make you do funny things to protect itself until you fully trust in the recovery, i.e., binging again. I was a little disappointed with her dissection about being a recovered anorexic, how she broke through, but happy in all that there was no lasting physical damage.

All the while I was reading the memoir, I was thinking about how a multimedia supplement would have been interesting (and sensational, which did not jive with the book)–that is, when she was really nervous and feeling unworthy on her first day on the Ally set and delivering her first lines, how did it actually look to the rest of us? When she was upset about her Rolling Stone and Shape covers, feeling like an imposter and/or having crash dieted and not felt adequate, how did she really look? How did she look at 130 lbs, really? At which weight did she look healthiest and strike the balance with her industry’s demands? How does she look today?

Like every other woman in this country, I’m constantly “watching what I eat” and have resigned myself, as if it was some lofty goal, that I could never be anorexic. It is really ugly in there and, bottom line, the issues at the root do not disappear with the weight.

Grad Student Etiquette from PhD Comics

Yikes, so we closed November 2011 and my NaNoWriMo word count is 27,638, half of a fairly short 50K-word novel. I outlined quite a bit ahead but life happened. For full disclosure, I actually wrote seven days’ worth in October (!) because I knew I would be in New York 1-7 November and only wrote 8 days in November proper. :o

My very first gap in writing started on 11/11/11, the day I went from unemployed with no prospects to unemployed with future employment. Then there was the scramble to get everything in order while I still had whole days free. Mum came to town because there was a funeral and the whole family gathered together for a weekend. Then I took a look at my study schedule and realized I must finish a course by 1 December! These are legitimate reasons, no? :)

I also hit a wall in writing. It came to a point where I could not face the subject material and not so much because I had spent too long on it. You see, I was writing a “romance novel”, fictionalizing a relationship that preceded NPY. It was a bit of a metaphor for taking chances and the story became a bit Eat, Pray, Love-like which was fine for a while but then I didn’t believe EPL is so great after all and I no longer had the same steam to write about events that are temporally so close. So maybe there will be enough distance, enough answers come through, that I can continue when I’m off for Christmas….

A bonus is that the souvenirs do not scream “tourist!” so much as other merchandise and transit (design) enthusiasts with some civic pride will also be interested in transit merchandise.

Recently, blogTO published a post to stir up some discussion about desirable merchandise to be sold in a reincarnation of the TTC gift shop. It’s a nice idea but TTC management is working out other issues at present and souvenir sales revenue is not a priority. I’m pretty vanilla and would like to pick up my TTC (and GO Transit) shot glass and colourful reusable totebag with the system maps but other people are way more creative than I am. Thus I was surfing all morning around related links, reminiscing, and generally procrastinating from studying….

Back when I was in junior high or high school, I was in Toronto over school break and hanging out with my cousin Sandy. She lived in North York at the time and one afternoon we accomplished one of her city goals in that we rode all along the Yonge-University-Spadina Line and collected a transfer at each station. I’m pretty sure I still have that bundle of transfers somewhere. More recently, Toronto NaNoWriMos did a Subway Write-In, and rode the whole Yonge-University-Spadina Line–about 3 hours–while writing up a storm and I dearly wished I could have gone but had other commitments to attend to.

Even more interesting than my vanilla “put the transit map on a bag” idea, are the pins for each of the TTC stations, coloured by the stations’ familiar tile colours. I don’t know what I would do with so many pins so I may prefer the them as pushpins or really strong magnets.

We were waiting for a table at “Din Tai Fung” a little while ago and saw someone else was waiting for a table and poring over a new book he bought, Transit Maps of the World. Lil Sis and I also looked at the book over his shoulder trying to guess the cities, laughing when one was particularly dense or sparse. I think I would like this coffee table book as well, but I’m not that interested in the bulk of the maps if I don’t have much connection to the city. I simply have to visit the cities, too!

Did you know there is a TTC font, Toronto Subway Regular? To me, it kind of looks like Helvetica but font enthusiasts would be quick to disagree! It can be purchased for $25.

I like the idea of removable wall decals but how to choose just one station?

I love this Jonathan Guy collage poster of the stations on the Yonge-University-Spadina and Bloor-Danforth line. It is made from photographs from each station and a good refresher of the stations’ colours. I grew up with the TTC and MTR (Hong Kong) station colours and you just have to glimpse the colour and know where you are if you’ve missed the announcement. In Vancouver, the stations are all white and you have to cran your neck to look up out of the train to orient yourself.

Finally, this doesn’t have to do with transit but that’s where all the sleuthing takes you, I learned that the following poster prints using typography to show neighbourhoods in a city are called Ork Posters. I love looking at the cities I know and have lived in. Like in Vancouver, I lived in Fairview while NPY is in Hastings Sunrise (I think). The Toronto Ork Poster is insane! Either Toronto is too subdivided and enthusiastic about naming everything or perhaps Ork went down too low a level? I think Toronto’s currently the densest of the Ork Posters!

My iPhone 3GS has been sliding down a steep slope of decline in the summer. We blame it on me throwing it in frustration over the summer months, onto my bed, couch, fleshy parts of NPY’s body…. Something started to rattle inside and the battery would drain with lightening speed such that I barely dared to start any apps if I was not plugged in. Also, when I had anywhere between 30-50% battery left, and especially if I was running a nonnative/intensive app, the phone would crash/shut down and sometimes could not be revived, totally drained of battery! It’s been a transition to not be able to spend a commute playing on my phone; back to writing in a notebook and reading a physical book. I spent an evening wiping and restoring my phone in case that was the problem and upgraded to iOS 5 when it was available and nothing changed. Time to change the battery, then. It was a no-brainer to order it myself (just $10 off eBay) and “perform the operation” myself (as a learning experience).

With High Tech Dad’s YouTube video as a guide, which I played over and over again at certain points as reassurance, I opened my iPhone and scratched off the “Do Not Remove” sticker. It was fun, unexpectedly complicated, but not so difficult except (1) my logic board did not come entirely out giving me complete access to the battery (2) the battery is stuck fast to the case (very adhesive 3M double-sided tape) (3) it was difficult to line up the logic board again with the screws (4) my SIM card would not fit at first–”my phone has no brain!” and (5) the screen does not feel quite as flush to the case now that I have put it back together.

Apparently if am performing a technician task, my preferred curse word starts with “S” and I’m shockingly profuse about it. My ISTJ personality points towards careers in law, surgery, and accounting. Lil Sis and I decided I can cross off the second one!

Result? Doesn’t seem to have helped. Oh well.

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This is a blog series complementing my regular blog posts with the original idea was to share our parallel lives, NPY’s and mine, while I’m in Toronto and he’s in Vancouver, 3,400 km away. For me, it’s been pretty fun because I’m this long-time blogger and enjoy repackaging parts of my life in “blog bites”. It’s been more difficult for NPY who hasn’t experienced a change in scenery (although I do not think it is necessary) so I’ll be continuing this with just my photos. I might have something every day. I might not.

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Got the pattern on Sunday. Getting the fabric tomorrow. Party’s on Saturday. At first I thought I would learn how to operate a sewing machine and make it but it looks like Lil Sis will burn the midnight oil and do it in the next few days because she’s awesome.

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This is a blog series complementing my regular blog posts with the original idea was to share our parallel lives, NPY’s and mine, while I’m in Toronto and he’s in Vancouver, 3,400 km away. For me, it’s been pretty fun because I’m this long-time blogger and enjoy repackaging parts of my life in “blog bites”. It’s been more difficult for NPY who hasn’t experienced a change in scenery (although I do not think it is necessary) so I’ll be continuing this with just my photos. I might have something every day. I might not.

< Next | Previous >

The title, Cheer! Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders, was so familiar to me because I watched all the episodes of the CW series, Hellcats, and Cheer! was always acknowledged in the opening credits as the basis of the series. One day, I was browsing around at The Frisky and it lead me to Kate Torgovnick’s list of 5 Books That Changed My Life. With full disclosure, she listed Cheer! as the fifth book. No doubt it changed her life to research and write it and we are supposed to believe that the resilience of cheerleaders should be inspiring. (It is.) Incidentally, two of her other life-changing books (Friday Night Lights and The Orchid Thief) are books that her reviewers compared Cheer! to. I didn’t need to be convinced–after all, Hellcats has been cancelled, sniff–I just needed a reminder of the book’s existence.

Torgovnick admits that she was far from interested in cheerleading and cheerleaders when she was in high school so the point-of-view of the book would be from fresh eyes on the sport. She arranged access to three teams in Texas, Memphis, and Louisiana who span the cheerleading spectrum. The SFA team is co-ed, cheering for the best cheer school in the country–they are on a four-year winning streak at Nationals but the squad is markedly different from before and the coach quits. The Southern squad is also co-ed but at a primarily black college with stronger dance choreography, and very limited funds–the school enjoyed a second place finish at Nationals and have the skills to be the first primarily black squad to win Nationals. Finally, the Memphis team is all-girl but a powerhouse that can do the same stunts that co-ed teams can do–all-girl teams are often underestimated and underfunded even though the squad won Nationals in the recent past.

I know it sounded inane but I tweeted that the book read like a documentary because I found it so compelling. The three squads’ stories are interleaved, but they are not in direct competition nor mention each other, and Torgovnick introduces the primary characters through the interactions at practice and some individual interviews. In a way, it felt like fiction but in the middle of the book, colour photos of the key players are included, a reminder that these people exist. (You can see the same photos and more at the book website. There is also a “book trailer“, a video to entice you to pick it up.) The scenarios that cheerleaders and their squad face throughout their season are complex and often times frustrating. Torgovnick was very sympathetic to all her characters and I was rooting for each team to be flawless and win! Part of me wanted to cut the suspense and look up the Nationals winners for that year but I somehow managed to refrain. It was worth it because the competition chapters were thrilling to read, exciting, frustrating, sad, and a good conclusion over all, given it was documenting real life.

While setting up this blog post, I was reminded of the Cheerleaders novel series that I used to avidly read. It was not the biggest series, as far as I could tell, and I only read about ten of the stories. Sigh, fond memories of more innocent times and long days at the small and cozy Cole Harbour Place Library!

A few months ago, I was searching for direction and for about 48 hours, I thought I would complete an Editing Certificate from Simon Fraser University and registered to attend a session to obtain more information about the certificate. I saw amongst the other sessions one featuring Terry Fallis, author of Canada Reads 2011 winner The Best Laid Plans, and registered.

The seminar rolled around last night and I was in two minds about going–spend 90 minutes learning more about a passion or enjoy one of very numbered nice Vancouver summer evenings? I tried to do both and was pleased that it spills over and provides material for the blog to have attended.

My route to finding The Best Laid Plans (TBLP) was pretty standard: I am subscribed to the podcast feed for Canada Reads and when TBLP won, the podcast was released so we could all finally learn for ourselves why it’s an essential Canadian read. It was a special treat that the chapters were read by the author himself since, it turns out, that was how the novel was first promoted, in podcast form. I was hooked from the beginning by the idea of the narrative given by a speechwriter (Fallis was himself a speechwriter/communications guy on Parliament Hill)–that is really promising for good writing.

It was a great privilege to get to see Fallis at a time when he’s on his way up. His second novel, a sequel to TBLP, was published in September 2010 and his third novel will be published in Fall 2012. It was also intimated that there could be talk of film rights being sold for his first book. I applauded to myself with some glee at that news.

Although Fallis is an engineer by training (never practiced) his passion for writing is clear from the fact that he owns the first edition of all novels that have won the Leacock Medal for Humour (which in 2008 came to include himself for TBLP). He set out to write what he knew and what he would have wanted to read himself, joking that writing what he knew saved himself a lot of time in research! It was also easier to write about the characters and plot devices if they are people he knows and experiences he has had.

True to his engineering background, his approach to drawing up an outline was like writing specifications and creating a blueprint with detailed point-form sections about settings and characters, and detailed bulleted lists for the plot of each chapter. It took him two months to write the outline which was 65 pages long, very long compared to others in the industry. (I really wish I thought to take a photo of the slide with his outline. Regret #1.) With such a detailed outline, he was able to write 300-page TBLP (100K words) in 8 months of weekends. When asked about his revising process, he said that for him, the detailed outline takes care of several drafts and he pretty much works on a first draft throughout. When he put out queries for response and interest from publishers, he received not a single response, which is not that surprising to me.

So he set out to go the self-publishing route (an eight-month process to get the manuscript in and formated at iUniverse) and use his PR skills to get the word out. As part of his day job, he created a weekly podcast so he was not lacking the technical skills to podcast TBLP, chapter by chapter. A webpage was created for the novel where the podcast episodes are hosted in addition to other promotional communications, he added the podcast to iTunes and created a Facebook page for the novel. He dropped off copies with independent bookstores, held a launch party at a pub, and attended a book signing at his alma mater university. Finally, since there was no rule barring self-published titles, he submitted TBLP for consideration for the Leacock award and as he got shortlisted and ultimately won, he acquired a literary agent and a publisher. I’ll still know the novel as the Canada Reads 2011 winner, a recognition that sells more copies than every prize except the Giller Prize.

Although TBLP‘s success has brought him a three-book deal with a major publisher, Fallis was frank about the paltry income from writing novels as a sole living, so he continues to have a full-time job since he has a family to support. I was impressed by his humble attitude and modesty acknowledging the role of great fortune for his success.

In a non-writing question, someone asked Fallis about the cover art. The first two covers depict the Parliament buildings as the central image while the current cover art is more stylized and relegates a Parliament image to the corner. He told us how he found the cover photo on Flickr and obtained the rights to use it as his cover. He overlaid the schematic of a hovercraft which adds some visual interest. His self-publishing publisher thought it looked like an annual report or something and helped him design the second cover. The photo was styled to look more like a painting, the hovercraft schematic given more weight, and contrasting white text boxes make it look more like a novel. But when he joined McClelland & Stewart, the the cover was completely revamped. While I think the second cover was “prettiest”, it was not satirical enough and the irregular font lends the impression that it is an offbeat, funny book.

On the publisher’s recommendation, Fallis once again released podcasts of his latest novel, The High Road, ahead of the actual release. He also believes in giving it away in a different format, saying more listen and then buy than not. For the time being, I might be in the latter camp although I really should have picked up a copy to get it signed. (Regret #2) I guess I will have to make a point of catching his book tour in fall 2012 and get it signed then.

It took a whopping 46 pages for me to start getting into it. I thought I was much more engrossed my some of my favourite dystopian books (1984, Brave New World, Handmaid’s Tale, etc.) long before that but at least I stuck it out. Until about two-thirds or further into the novel, the chapters alternated between told from Lenny’s voice, his narrative and kind of navel-gazing entries from his diary, possibly the last diary being written in the near future United States. The other chapters are taken from GlobalTeens emails and instant messages between Eunice and her sister, mother, or best friend. Think of GlobalTeens as a cross between Facebook and Google, your one-stop social tool and search engine.

In the near future SSTLS world, the credit crisis in the United States has continued and gotten worse or some truly bad decisions were made and now the big creditor is China and the world is pretty much upside down as we know it. The US dollar is now pegged to the yuan or euro, yuan being a much more stable currency for trade even in the U.S. As a result the U.S. pretty much bends over for China and the need and extent of learning Chinese and their culture is ramped up. I’m not so versed with the (real world) credit crisis and the effects over the years to be able to compare the accurate projection of the SSTLS economy and effects.

As for the state of media, technology and pop culture of the SSTLS world, I follow much better the progression from what we see today versus Shteyngart’s satirical and dystopic version. Today, people willingly supply and share personal data and activities on Facebook and Twitter.  Let me also include Google+ to be on top of things. In addition to carrying devices that can update in real-time to a website all your stats (e.g., a pedometer and your smartphone), there are sites like Daytum where daily data down to the mundane such as how many glasses of water you have drank can be captured and shared. Everyone can be a “journalist” and there is no shortage of informative or useless blogs, podcasts, and vlogs. There is continued desensitization towards sexual references and visuals in mainstream media and how far will that go? Marketing is intensive but there are still voices of reason punching through the smoke. Any new medium prompts the widespread lament of another hit on formal language, just as text-messaging is blamed for decreasing attentiveness to communicative language that can stand alone. And information is being delivered more efficiently via RSS feeds and in shorter segments so driven by the 140 character limit of early text message-capable cell phones and Twitter. All of these services are vying to be your portal to the Internet, customized to your preferences and with the non-stop pace of life, information is delivered like on a stream. That is the state of things now.

In the SSTLS world, everyone with some means wears a pebble-size äppärät that is pretty much our smartphones in a few more (people) generations. Turn it on anywhere and (the exact description or mechanism is not provided) it’s your personal entertainment center providing all the streaming data of news and, most alarmingly, real-time vital statistics of people surrounding you. In SSTLS, data privacy pretty much does not exist from the employees’ vital signs being posted like a departures board at the airport to measure employee well-being to instantly accessing everyone’s information and ranking them on Hotness, Credit Rating, and the like when you enter a bar full of potential mates or social partners. The people simply known as Media aren’t so far-fetched, thinking they have such a unique take on the world to broadcast everything as they go about life. In SSTLS, books are retired from existence and generally reviled; no one reads every word in a literary work, referred to as “bound, printed nonstreaming Media artifact”, instead people “scan text” for words. The decline of language as we know it is apparent in Eunice’s “emails” (by then called “teens” for GlobalTeens) with her best friend–thoughts are choppy and jumping around and satire is apparent from the common acronyms tossed around JBF (you can look that up) and TIMATOV (Think I’M About To Openly Vomit). Youth are sexualized at a very tender age which is empowering (or the opposite) and more satire ensues in the kind of products women do not battle an eyelash towards wearing: TotalSurrender underwear that seems to scroll out of the way at the touch of a button and OnionSkin jeans that are translucent because… it’s acceptable to show off that region. My jaw metaphorically hit the floor when I read about Hartford’s video-casted news segments that are interlaced with scenes of him performing sexual acts with other men, then learned that it could be based on a real Japanese pornographic newscast!

There’s elements of 1984 with the encroaching totalitarian state and the unlikely relationship between Lenny and Eunice. It also hearkens Brave New World with the pacification and ignorance of the masses. And, although I never read it, the rejection of books has some strains of Fahrenheit 451.

While I was reading SSTLS, I worried tremendously that I wasn’t “getting it”. I think the satire that is additional to the dystopic fiction I like threw me off because I took it literally and got bothered. I couldn’t find myself feeling empathy for Lenny (who is a clingy, naive, defeated drip of a man) or Eunice (who has potential to not be a write-off like her generation, but not really). Their ill-fated cross-cultural relationship was painful to read about but it was their respective trials with immigrant parents–both sets struggled to came to the U.S. only to live through the U.S. collapsing–that touched me the most. In the correspondences Eunice has (separately) with her mother, sister, and best friend, I could see my own corollary communications with my mother, sister, and best friend. Given how Shteyngart (now 38 or 39) relied on a research assistant to introduce him to Facebook and “i-Telephone”, I was impressed how he can write in Lenny’s voice as a, basically, insecure man and then switch to the immigrant Korean (Eunice’s mother) voice, and a young, obsessive, hyper female voice.

I still don’t think I “got it” and that worried me. But since I like speculative sci-fi as a way to explore a different world, SSTLS certainly fleshed out a fascinating and aggravating  potential future for this world.

Although Sense & Sensibility as a Marvel comic came out on November 17, 2010, I do not darken the doorways of comic book stores and only learned about it in April 2011 from an LJC blog entry. I tremulously entered a comic book store one day and saw there were Female Force comics of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Martha Stewart, to name a few, and no Jane Austen. It was much more comfortable to surf the bookstore from home!

I decided upon Sense & Sensibility because I do not have any edition of that novel and have never read it in any form, although I have watched the Ang Lee film version several times. I don’t own Pride & Prejudice either but that comic is a touch older, and I just didn’t like the tabloid-style cover. Emma, whom we all know and love, is not available as a complete volume until September this year. It seems that each novel is first released in about five episodes and they might have paper covers for all I know; but the online bookstores are carrying the complete novel, which is the format I prefer.

In the Introduction, adapter Nancy Butler writes that Sense & Sensibility is arguably the most complex of Austen’s stories. In addition to the complex story of courtship and manners of that time, it is also the story of the love between sisters who are complete opposites in character. Sense & Sensibility is illustrated by Sonny Liew–there is a different illustrator for each Austen story Butler has adapted, for some reason–and am I glad because Liew illustrates the characters in most adorable chibi style, where the characters are “super deformed” with oversized heads.

I’d have to admit it look me a moment to adjust to reading non-linearly, which might be the charm of reading graphic novels; it’s been so long since I’ve read an Archie comic! Sometimes I didn’t know in which direction to read, either the panel flow or even speech bubble flow when two people are having a conversation in one panel.

NPY is no stranger to the graphic novelization of non-superhero stories (boys) and wondered what I get out of the Butler/Liew adaptation which invited a short spiel. I can appreciate that the adaptation of a novel so dense and heavy on dialogue needed to be carefully re-formatted to flow as a graphic novel is expected to be. I can just imagine the intricate storyboards that they had to go through to present story and illustration succinctly, accurately, and memorably.

The above page had some wonderful examples of illustration propelling forward the story. In the very first panel John Dashwood, stingy half-brother to the Dashwood sisters Elinor and Marianne, blathers his pleasure the sisters are settled comfortably without his aid. He is in a drawing room with other people but they are not shown in the first panel because his empty words do not mean anything to them. In the bottom left panel, John and Elinor walk through town while he oh-so-casually, with his eyes carefully watching Elinor, tries to get some gossip about very good marriage prospects for the sisters; Elinor, respectful sister, walks a step behind, head bowed, but also trying to answer him diplomatically and discreetly. Elinor is illustrated differently from every other female character with a thin face and high forehead not adorned with bangs–she stands out amongst the ladies, the epitome of sense, even more severe than her mother. Finally, the impact of illustration fitting Jane Austen writing really hit me in the second last panel with a classic silhouette and three linked speech bubbles with quite a bit of text each. John Dashwood is that pompous character we come to expect in Austen novels, talking at length with exaggerated modesty but the irony is the reader and Elinor can see through it all. It was all a great deal of fun to read!

During the writing process, Angela released parts of her memoir as blog entries but since I did not read her entries necessarily in order, I stopped reading those posts, preferring to get the story all at once, as a book in my hands. You can’t do that with a serialized blog story, you know? And, as luck would have it, people who weighed in on the possible cover designs for the memoir were sent a copy of the book. Thanks, Angela!!

In the first part, in 1993, Angela and Joe meet in university and their relationship develops. They have good times and bad, where the bad ones made me squirm because I recognized my own relationships in those interactions. We know what’s coming, but I have certainly also missed the signs myself.

In the second part, in 1998, Angela embarks on her teaching assignment in China. Having visited Beijing recently, I was nodding along with her honest exposé of her living conditions and observations of interpersonal relations around her. We meet her cousin Huang Lei who embraces her like a sister during her time there, but Angela’s presence in China sets in motion a series of events that changes her cousin’s life forever. I’ve read references to that story in her blog, but getting the story from the top was really interesting, particularly since I’m fascinated by the traditional Chinese attitudes towards love and marriage.

The third part, simply titled “Rat and Rat”, describes Angela’s relationship with and care of Joe’s mother who has Parkinson’s disease, juxtaposing it with her outside life (or lack thereof). I wholeheartedly admired how she accepted her responsibility like the dutiful Asian daughter-in-law that I could never be. Blogs are a peculiar platform and the voice one develops for it may not reflect all sides of you–I saw a really sensitive and caring side of Angela. I’m not sure the caretaker role was natural to her, but she wore it anyhow even as things around her got worse and many others would simply quit. I was indignant for her (and relayed the anecdotes all to NPY) by her treatment by her in-laws who acted both callously and under the guise of tradition. I wondered while reading this part how a writer chooses and justifies the degree of exposition of other people’s lives.

In the fourth and fifth parts, we’ve been through the set-up but everything changes. Angela faces the most wretched of decisions that doesn’t have the most clear right or wrong path. There was a lot of foreshadowing in the previous parts but the last two parts were more in the present, no hazy glow, just the pain of reality. At the end, she takes a trip abroad to meet up with her cousin and they can compare notes on how similar, or not, their paths have been.

Each of the five parts of the memoir indicate the zodiac animals who will figure the most in that part and haiku poems illustrate the kind of interaction they have. The chapters are simply titled the year of the events (1993-2005) which, especially the earlier years, instantly transported me back to that awkward time and my relationships back then. Zodiac signs’ compatibility, symbols such as the eponymous black fish, and fortune-tellers’ readings are interwoven with the story, lending the feeling that despite all the rational decisions, all-too-human actions and reactions, there might have been a greater force at work, a taunting but benevolent force in the end.

Sometimes you read a blog for long enough and you think you know someone, especially if they aren’t always fake-smiley and seem to write honestly. Still, there are more dimensions to the author and I was constantly amazed by how much Angela had to go through, more than anyone I know. I loved how the story was laid out, strictly chronologically, with references to symbols and signs to tie events together–simple yet grand. I did not know before reading the book, but I think there’s screenplay adaptation potential to her story: there is Angela’s main story with changes in her roles and scenery over the years; then, there is Huang Lei’s story which mirrors to some extent Angela’s, reinforcing the central message. Finally, I really enjoyed how Angela’s tone was similar to what I’ve grown to like on her blog–honest and brave, like your not-too-girly girlfriend telling you her story. Let’s face it, I wasn’t going to be friends with the overly girly types anyways.

Disclosure: Review (cmp.ly/1 ) I have not been paid to review or post about the topic.