Do you know what is fun?  Talking about books.  Do you know what could help me out tremendously?  Talking about mine.  (If you’ve ever wanted to give me a gift, this would be what I want.)

Lavender Luz is hosting a book tour for my newest book, Apart at the Seams (thank you!).  Sign up goes until August 1st, and the posts will go up September 4th.  See, lots of time to read the book and join along.  All you need to do right now is click over and fill out Lori’s online form to let her know you’re participating.

Pretty please?  With sprinkles on top?

If you can’t participate, but still want to do something, consider spreading word with a blog post, Goodreads review, Amazon review, or getting an enormous Arianna tattoo across your lower back.  Really, you won’t regret having her face plastered across your skin for eternity.  I am considering getting two of them — one for each knee cap.

On a serious note, an enormous thank you in advance to everyone who is helping spread word.

I am!  I am smart enough to get into a New York kindergarten.  Hello, Horace Mann: I’d like to introduce you to your newest kindergartener.  Me!  Me!  I’m going to kindy!

I scored 5 out of 5 on the kindergarten assessment.

Click the screenshot to take the quiz:

Will you be my kindergarten classmate?  I’m warning you ahead of time: I am a paste-eater.

Every morning, I spend a straight half hour with my thoughts. I’m aware that I’m supposed to be clearing my mind while I’m on the yoga mat. The nice woman on the screen* tells me to clear my mind; empty it. Just concentrate on my breathing. That is very hard to do. I am a thinky sort of person. I like thinking. Telling me to clear my mind is like telling me to eat non-vegetarian food. It’s not as if I can’t, per se. But I don’t eat animals so I would likely vomit if I tried to eat meat… or not think…

I would have a brain vomit.

I’ve stopped fighting my brain’s tendency to run through thoughts, and I’ve instead embraced my yoga time as a thinking time.  I know that makes me a bad yogi.  I mean, the whole point of yoga is to train your body so you can spend long periods of time meditating.  The fact that I can’t even clear my mind while I do yoga doesn’t bode well.

In the same way that I go through various physical poses during yoga, I alter between types of thinking based on where I am in the routine.  During the opening stretches, I’m usually thinking about my current life: things I must do, things worrying me, things that will happen that day.  It’s like a little warm-up routine for my brain.  I mean, yes, it stretches my mind a little to wrap itself around all my fears so early in the morning, but it’s a good stretch; that yummy sort of pain as the brain goes into a pose that feels completely familiar.

In the middle of the routine, when we’re doing things like “camel,” I’m thinking through whatever scene I’m writing in the moment.  I’m mentally playing around with characters and trying out bits of conversation.  And finally, when the routine switches to the stillness of gasp-inducing stretches such as “folded pigeon,” I move into daydreaming.  Which is like nightdreaming.  Except I’m awake.  Or I take someone else’s characters and act out a little piece of mental fan fiction.

So a half hour of thinkiness.

Josh told me about an article over the weekend that found that people would rather administer electrical shocks to themselves than sit alone with their thoughts.  One of the authors of the study is Daniel Gilbert who wrote Stumbling on Happiness.  i09 reported on the study, and I love this quote: “But what is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 min was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid.”

Granted, I am doing something when I am thinking through yoga, but I also sit and do inverted meditation — that’s what I call when I sit still and instead of emptying my mind, I fill my mind — several times every day.  Like just sitting on the sofa and staring at the cushion and thinking.  I don’t think I’d opt for the shock.  I mean, I really don’t like shocks.  I really do like thinking.

Even when I’m thinking about things I don’t like to think about.

Because I don’t look at thinking as doing nothing.  I mean, thinking is thinking.  It’s something.  Nothingness would be real meditation: getting to a state of not thinking and not doing.  That would probably drive me mad.  But thinking; that’s productive.  Even unproductive thought (like circling the same fear for the third time) feels productive.

Do you mind being alone with your thoughts?  Would you always opt to do something rather than nothing?

* An unrelated side note: I love the Yoga Studio app even more now with the new update because I can upload my yoga music to play underneath the woman’s breathy voice. This app has changed my life.

Perhaps it’s because the signs belong to a religious institution, but I always think that G-d speaks to me via church signs since burning bushes release dangerous levels of carbon dioxide.  I assume G-d wasn’t thinking about the potential greenhouse gases that would be released into the atmosphere when he spoke to Moses, causing global warming.  But now he’s given it some thought and realized that church signs are much more environmentally-friendly way to communicate with individuals.

Anyway, I read church signs as I pass, and while the vast majority don’t seem applicable to my life, and they must be meant for someone else…

“Use sonscreen to prevent sinburn.”

…this one spoke to me.

It wasn’t really on the Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church.  It was on a church that I pass on the way to my parent’s house.  But that church is on an inconvenient curve in the road, and I wasn’t about to pull into the parking lot just to take a photo.  So I made that on a church sign generator.  Which, I know, feels like cheating.  But the point is the message.  Isn’t that a smart message?

“Tough times never last, but tough people do.”

As I drove I thought, “I could be a tough person.”  I mean, I’m not a particularly tough person now, but I could make a point to become one since it is true that — if personal history is correct — tough times don’t last.  I could keep that in mind and pace myself.  I could choose toughness.

I came home and recited it to Josh, who finished saying it aloud with me after the comma.

“Oh!” I said.  “You saw the same sign?”

“No, Melissa, that is just a familiar cliche.”

“I found it helpful.  It gave me a new perspective on life.”

I felt defensive about my church sign.

I decided to Google the saying and discovered it was a popular platitude, attributed to Robert H. Schuller.  Who was Robert H. Schuller, I wondered.  He was a televangelist who ran a program called the Hour of Power.

Oh.

My first thought was the lyrics to Frank Zappa’s “Bobby Brown Goes Down.”  Didn’t he say he could last an hour… power…  So then I needed to Google that song, which actually is a Tower of Power and not an Hour of Power.  (“I can take about an hour on the tower of power / As long as I get a little golden shower”)

And that reminded me of a harrowing drive I made between Milan and Venice in the backseat of a friend’s car as he drove over 100 mph, and I had to translate and explain an entire cassette of Frank Zappa songs for him. (“But, Melissa, what is a golden shower?”)  I was gritting my teeth, my entire body tense as his tiny car rattled over the highway, thinking, “dear G-d, dear G-d, let me get to Venice in one piece.”  And that didn’t last, you know.  That tough car ride had an end point when we arrived at a long-term parking lot so we could take a boat the rest of the way into the city.

See, I was tough.

Which brings me back full circle to the fact that sometimes you get the church sign you need.

I’m not sure this has ever happened to me.

There have been times when an author has left a story open-ended, and the reader is allowed to argue (during a book club, let’s say) the ending.  More often, there is a clearly defined ending, and people are left only to argue whether or not they think the ending fit with the story.  But this is the first time when there has been a clear ending to a book; an ending that everyone else seems to get… and I closed the book having no clue what happened.

I mean, literally, no clue.

So in asking about this book, I will need to talk about the ending of this book.  Stop reading if you plan on reading Herman Koch’s Summer House with Swimming Pool.

I mean it, stop.

I’m even putting a little space here between the fact that there will be spoilers and the spoilers themselves so you can click off the screen.

Click away.

Good.  Everyone else still here has either read the book or simply doesn’t care that the ENTIRE END OF THE BOOK WILL BE RUINED.

I warned you.

So the story ends with Ralph dead due to Marc’s actions.  We’re told Marc performs the botched biopsy in order to kill Ralph because he suspects him as the rapist.  Ralph confesses to Marc on his deathbed the stuff about the repairman and how Julia faked the rape.  Then we have the bizarre Stanley and the fact that Marc would fly his daughter out there for the photos.  And then we have the fact that Marc is looking at his little girl as a woman, and all of his talk about child molesters.

So.

Was Ralph telling the truth about the repairman or did he make up that story because he was the rapist?  Or because Alex was the rapist?

Or is this straightforward: the repairman was the rapist?

Or is Stanley the rapist and Ralph knew so he gave Marc that red herring?

Or is Marc the rapist, and the whole book has been a red herring?  Because his behaviour, especially not pursing the rapist in the moment, felt odd to me.

I closed the book completely unclear on what the author wanted me to think, which is — perhaps — a problem with the story.  This book didn’t feel open-ended.  It feels as if one of those options above is the one the author wants us to believe by the last page.  The problem is that I’m not sure which one.

Did I like the book?  Yes… I think?  Enough that I got another one of his books out of the library before I finished this one.  But… disturbed me too?  What did everyone else think of it?