Fun with Lists -- Or, An Award of Our Own

Vijaya Bodach and Kim Kasch awarded me this Kreativ Blogger award. I'm honored by the implication that I not only blog creatively, but possibly kreativly. Although not in the area of spelling, I hope. :)

I'm to name seven things I love and then pass the award to several others. Maybe seven others? I'll have to visit their blogs again to find out. Hmmmm, these awards are useful little things for promo, no? :D

Okay, for the list:

1. I love Jesus. The more I go all-out in faith, the more real He gets, and the more I see that fantastic-sounding scriptures really are true. And then all the promises of the Bible open up to me and I want to find out how to realize them. Wow. I'm an actual child of the King of the universe.

2. I love books. I don't know how non-readers live. And though I might possibly love books enough to do whatever it takes to read them, including invest in e-reading gadgets if those are the only way to go in the future, I sure hope they're not. I love the physicality of books as well as the contents. Besides, I read and write all day on the screen. Enough screens, already.

3. I love singing on my church's worship team. Now, I'm not the best singer that ever came down the pike, but I ain't bad, and the old girl's pipes can get some of those long-ago abilities back, even after a period of dormancy. I love it, I'm honored they'll have me, and it's an opportunity I didn't expect to get since most churches want you to be -- ahem, not quite so long in the tooth to be in a band. But our mid-20s worship leader not only doesn't care, he actively wants me. Amazing.

4. I love fruit. The snap of a fresh-picked McIntosh apple as you bite into it. Tangy citrus; sweet strawberries; smooth bananas; the juice-explosions of plums, peaches and pineapple; those little nubbins raspberries are made of -- I love it all.

5. I love ice cream. I LOVE ice cream. Which, in the calorie department, I guess cancels out loving fruit. No wait -- that's balances out, right?

6. I love my husband and children. And that definitely includes the kids-in-law and grands. While I mean no slight to my husband here -- oh, my, the kids. There's no other love quite like it. As somebody said, when you have kids, you start walking around with your heart outside your body. We joke that "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." But it's just as true, as Anne Bradstreet wrote of her children, "I happy am, if well with you."

7. I love good friendships. I've been really up and down in this area of life. I've had periods of wonderful, one-of-a-kind friendships, and I've had friendless periods that lasted years. Fortunately, I'm on an upswing. :)

8. Okay, I need an eighth. I love to write, of course!

And now it's time to pass it on. The thing is, I don't want to pass this award on to people who've already gotten it, so I shall also have to check blogs to see who has, and hope I don't accidentally repeat. And to people about whom I'd be curious to know what seven things they love. So I'm off to do the research. Okay, I'm back. The Kreativ Blogger award -- hey, you can all say that on this day of the Newbery et. al awards, you too have won something -- goes to: Anne Spollen, Susan Gray, PJ Hoover, Mary Whitsell, Nora MacFarlane, and Donna.

But I Exaggerate . . .

Time for some more nifty rhetorical devices, alias wordplay, today. Hypberbole (not to be confused with the above, which is a hyperbola [y=1/x, to be precise], which is math [I did say there'd be math in this blog]) is exaggeration meant to create a vivid, funny or memorable effect: I gained five hundred pounds over Christmas. There are more crowns on my molars than on the crowned heads of Europe. The words in my mouth have more flavor than these powdered mashed potatoes.

**Quizzy Time: Guess which one of the above is mostly true of me? Guess which one is just a smidgen true?

The opposite of hyperbole is understatement, which isn't exaggeration in the sense of making something bigger than it is, but we could argue that you can exaggerate smallness too, yes? For that we have a cool technique called litotes (LYE-teh-teez), an indirect statement that dampens the impact of something by negating its opposite or making light of the truth. He's not too swift. Wrapping your car around that tree didn't do much for the front end. And perhaps my all-time favorite, which I heard at work years ago, She's just a little pregnant around the edges.

Apophasis (ah-PAHF-ah-sis) is understatement that states something by stating it will not be stated. These are all your "needless to say," "I don't need to tell you" and "as you undoubtedly know" remarks. Like all understatement, it's meant to get a point across in a delicate, persuasive, wryly humorous, or inoffensive manner, giving directions yet expressing your confidence that the person already knows as much. Then again, apophasis can signal an antagonist that your words have teeth while still remaining pleasant: For the moment we'll overlook any rumors that you blew the entire month's payroll at the casino.

Well, I'd better go make supper before everybody starves to death. Such an event wouldn't exactly make our families' weekend. Needless to say, I'll expect some comments on this post. :)

Book of the Semi-Month Club

Rex Zero, King of Nothing by Tim Wynne-Jones is a middle-grade novel set in 1962 Ottawa. One month after the Cuban missile crisis, Rex Norton-Norton (whose last name is a subtraction problem, his friends note) is due to attend an Armistice Day ceremony -- which Rex had misunderstood as "Our Mistress Day" -- with his father, a WWII vet who "always gets crabby this time of year." So unenthusiastic about this occasion is Rex that he honestly forgets, standing his father up and creating distance between the two of them that he regrets but doesn't know how to bridge. With five siblings; a fascinatingly horrible substitute teacher; a collection of funny, loyal friends; the discovery of a little black book of phone numbers in a phone booth; a mixture of crush and worry over a young woman married to an angry husband; and increasing secrecy on the part of his father; eleven-year-old Rex has plenty to sort out in this active, funny and heartwarming novel about the many different expressions of love.

I found both the family and the friends funny, thoughtful, and engaging, but I was really caught up in the teacher, Miss Garr. I had Miss Garr in elementary school. She's the kind of teacher who, when you calculate that a week after November 26th is November 33rd, as Rex does, and the students roar and the class clown literally rolls in the aisle, says to the clown, "Do you think it polite to show such disrespect because of the stupidity of a fellow classmate? Have you no concern for his feelings?" She's the kind of teacher who, when a student reveals that he knows the song she mentions as her favorite, as Rex does, decides that a fitting punishment for some infraction would be to make him sing that song in front of the class. ("I didn't used to hate the song. Now I do," Rex says later.) She's the kind of teacher who, when someone needs help with his math, as Rex does, says to the kid in the next seat, "Help your mathematically inept friend, will you?" If the fact that I'm reading about "kids my own age" here weren't reason enough to ID with these characters, I SO had Miss Garr in elementary school. Yet she has her sympathetic point: Miss Garr's turns at playground duty show her special affinity with younger children. Miss Garr's problem (though I don't think this would have been the answer for my Miss Garr) is that she's teaching at the wrong grade level.

Another thing I love about this book is the number of subplots. I'm sure somebody somewhere would say that theoretically this book has too many for a mid-grade novel. About a third of the way through the novel, Rex does something that helps not only himself but readers get a handle on all of the plot threads. He lists several of them: 1) Why has my father been acting so strange? 2) What is the story my mother thought he was going to tell me on Armistice Day? 3) Why was Annie [his sister] snooping in Dad's study? 4) Who is the beautiful Natasha Lavender and why is she so sad? 5) Why is she called "Nate" in some guy's address book? 6) What is Kathy going to do about Dr. Arnold Schwartz? 7) What is my class going to do about Miss Garr? From this point on, the author tightly weaves all of these -- and more -- together until all are resolved at the end. Rex's string of mysteries creates an active, concrete plot structure for a novel whose overall aim is more psychological -- to explore what it means to love, to become a man, to be loyal, to take responsibility. It all works very well.

Rex has some great lines. Waking up one morning he says, "I feel smart, just like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz when the wizard gives him a diploma. Morning is like a diploma." He describes a wobby smile as "a smile with training wheels." Though some might object to the present-tense narration, I barely noticed it. I think we've reached the point where objecting to present tense just because it's present tense makes no more sense than objecting to past tense because it's past. Just throwing it out there. :)