This question is part of the GRAB(ook) Club, an online book club open to anyone and everyone.  It contains more than a few spoilers for Catching Fire, so read at your own peril.  No, really, stop reading this post if you plan on reading the Hunger Games trilogy.

So, Catching Fire managed to shock the shit out of me at the end.  I’ll admit that I had Hunger Games ruined for me when the press people started sending me Catching Fire movie images while I was reading the first book.  I inadvertently saw who was still alive, and therefore knew who would be the winner, though not how.  Still, I was a little annoyed that it was inadvertently ruined even though the book was still enjoyable.

On the other hand, I went through Catching Fire wondering how the hell they’d get out a second time, and… wow… that ending.  Blew my little mind.  I don’t know why I didn’t consider it, but I didn’t.

I have a push-me-pull-you relationship with spoilers.  On one hand, I obviously dislike them since they ruin the author’s story telling effect.  Catching Fire wouldn’t have emotionally affected me if I knew what was going to happen at the end.  I was thrilled by the surprise.  And, for me, it was that surprise that made the book.  On the other hand, I have been known to sneak onto spoiler sites or read articles that I know will ruin a movie or book.  I also sometimes flip ahead a page or two in the middle of intense action to get a sense of where things are going.  I can’t help myself.  I’m like someone who breathes too heavily next to someone else’s birthday candles.  On one hand, I don’t want to blow them out, but on the other hand, I’m certainly saying a lot of words with drawn-out, heavily inflected “H”s.

You can’t have it both ways.

Do you like spoilers, or do you like to go into books knowing nothing?

And were you surprised by the ending?

After you answer my question, please click over to read the rest of the book club questions for Catching Fire.  You can get your own copy of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins at bookstores including Amazon.

This is a post for the GRAB(ook) Club. Like the idea of a book club where you don’t have to leave your living room? Then read more about the GRAB(ook) Club which holds the book discussion on blogs, a Facebook group, and a GoodReads group.

Updated at the Bottom

I woke up this morning to a cold snow and a cold realization: the Candy Crush Prize Wheel is gone.  No more free spins.  No more boosters.  No more collecting of sweet lollipop hammers or striped/wrap combos.

It left in the night without so much as a goodbye.

If I had known that yesterday would be my last spin, I would have spent more time with it.  I would have told the Prize Wheel how much I loved spinning it every morning.  I would have whispered thank you to the screen.

For the love, King.com, you make the levels so difficult, and then you take away our Prize Wheel?  You made me want to weep — WEEP — with level 350.  You can’t give me my one joy?  Don’t you realize that I never even used the boosters?  I just liked collecting them.  I have about 12 speckled doughnuts lying in wait.  Your Prize Wheel was like the free burrito wheel at California Tortilla.  No one goes to the restaurant to spin the Monday Night Mystery Prize Burrito Wheel, but we appreciate the ability to set something spinning while we wait for our meal.

I liked spinning the wheel.

At least the Dreamworld is still there.

Please don’t take away my Dreamworld too, King.com.  Leave me at least that.

Update:

My Prize Wheel is back!  My Prize Wheel is back!  My Prize Wheel is back!

Oh sweet Prize Wheel, I’m sorry that I took you for granted.  Even if you’re only popping in for a visit, I am so glad to see you again.  I will spin you daily.  I will croon sweet words at the screen.

AND…

Even better…

Dreamworld is now on my phone.  It just showed up when I logged in today.  So now I have the Dreamworld on the computer and on my phone.

I love you, Candy Crush.

Even though I sort of hate you for level 356.

But really, even though I curse you for that level, I do love you.

Loribeth had a post about Elf on a Shelf that I featured in the Roundup, lamenting how intense celebrating Christmas has gotten lately.  She writes, “But these days, it seems the pressure to do more, buy more, give more gifts — on top of all the other pressures of modern life and parenting — just keep ratcheting upward.”  And while I’ve definitely noticed it with Christmas and I don’t even celebrate the holiday (starting with Christmas decorations up in October, continuing with the onslaught of Christmas programming and commercials going through January, and blowing this non-Christian’s mind with the idea that $224 is a small amount to spend on Christmas gifts for a single person), it feels as if it’s true with everything.

Meals are no longer food to enjoy in the moment or sustain our bodies.  They are photographic evidence of the deliciousness that went in our mouths (extra points if it looks amazing and complicated).  Don’t even bother cooking or ordering something that may taste great but doesn’t photograph well.  Decorations are no longer decorations; they are a statement of how much time we are willing to caress our hot glue guns.  Halloween costumes are over the top, Valentines go beyond the little paper card, and birthday cakes for three-year-olds are taking on the proportions, cost, and complications of wedding cakes.

I can rarely find simple recipes on food blogs anymore.  Instead I find posts with 25 images, each artfully taken, photoshopped, and cropped to walk you through how to chop up tomatoes for bruschetta.  Fine, the image tutorials help if you’re making something unusual and complicated such as… let’s say… turducken.  But scrolling through image after image of putting together a salad just because images are pretty and pinnable and we feel as if there must be pictures to keep up with the blogging Joneses?  That goes over my gratuitous/warranted line.

Here’s the thing: it’s all pretty to look at, but the volume has gotten way too loud.  It’s like when you go to hear your favourite band play, and at first you’re enjoying yourself.  But after a few songs, you realize that the volume is up so high that it isn’t fun anymore.  It hurts your ears to listen to your favourite band, and even though you’ve been looking forward to the concert for weeks, you’d sort of rather be curled up in bed than having your ears assaulted.

I think what Loribeth is seeing with Christmas is an offshoot of what we’ve been seeing all year due to social media.  You’re not just outdoing yourself or your neighbours for the holidays.  You’re now feeling the pressure from Pinterest and blogs and your Facebook feed.  You’re hearing tons of interesting ideas and want to try them out yourself (and that’s a good thing), but it’s also a feeling that you’re not doing “enough” for the holidays if you’re not doing it all (which is a bad thing).

After all, if that person can manage a nativity scene made out of Rice Krispies treats that she artfully carved alongside her beaming children with a hotly buttered knife, what does it say about how much you love your child if you don’t attempt to make a little, baby Rice Krispies Jesus on a bed of crumbled Chex?  Don’t you love Christmas enough to attempt cereal craft projects?

The same goes for the machine that is generating all this holiday angst: social media itself.  How many people have felt that their blog isn’t “good enough” when they hear opportunities others get or their traffic or see their pretty blog design?  How many people have felt that they must be doing something wrong if someone starts a Twitter account and instantly has 1000 followers while your three-year-old account still only has 67?

I certainly have gotten the sense that I’m not doing my friendships correctly when I see everyone else having fun on Facebook, and I do think about how I’m contributing to other people’s feelings when I post my own grinning face while out for the evening.

I’m not suggesting that we throw out the baby with the bathwater and get rid of social media, or even that people stop posting their pistachio flower tutorials and clever gender reveal cakes.  But I do think it helps to bring it into perspective when we think about how a bigness has taken over.  That too many people are trying to strive for quality and quantity at the same time, which is possible to achieve, but always at a cost.  I’m not willing to give up Facebook, even though it makes me feel like shit half the time when I see what I’ve either been left out of or missed.  Because there is always that other half of the time when I feel close to people far away, figuratively part of more people’s worlds than I ever could conceivably be without social media.

But I do need to complain about the volume just as I would if I were at that concert. (And yes, I am that patron at the movie theater who asks the projectionist to turn down the sound when the special effects are making my bones shake from the noise.)  On the off-chance that someone will turn it down a notch or at least commiserate to let me know I’m not the only person who thinks that everything has gotten too damn loud.

Image: Bobistraveling via Flickr

I have seen a number of tweets mocking Washingtonians and our inability to deal with snow.  We close our schools, we buy out all the bread and milk in the store, and we stay home blogging about how scared we are to lose power every time solid precipitation comes down from the sky.  There are those who blame our mentality on Marion Barry and his ideology for snow removal: “The Lord Giveth, and the Lord Taketh Away.”  But they would be remembering 1995… and 1996… or that time they hired private firms to plow the snow and they didn’t pay them and then those firms refused to plow until they were paid.  Anyway, a large chunk of Washington’s population flips over every year since our business is government, therefore I don’t think our attitude can be traced to the actions of a single person, but rather the depth of truth in John F. Kennedy’s observations about the capital:

“Washington D.C. is a town of Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency.”

We’re dicks AND we’re incapable of getting stuff done.

We ALSO have neither the temperate climate of the South nor the ability to deal with inclement weather like the North.  We are a city in between, bi-partisan in the greatest sense of the word, and because of our ambivalence, we are unable to actually work together with snow to get through it any more than we can work together as humans to pass a budget.

Fancy Yankees move to our capital and believe THEY can drive in the snow.  A case in point: Josh slept downtown last night after attending an event.  Being from New Jersey, he thought he could drive home at night.  Is he fucking kidding me?  I shrieked at him that if he didn’t get a hotel room and sleep downtown, that I would kill him once he tried to enter the house simply for driving over ice when the Capital Weather Gang (who are essentially our spiritual gurus in this town) cautioned that even SUVs were having trouble with skidding.

Even if former Northerners know what to do to travel over snow, the Southern transplants don’t.  It doesn’t matter if you are capable of driving if the people around you aren’t.

Snow gives Washingtonians a chance to stop and talk about something we share in common; our inability to function around it.  It is the ONLY time Washingtonians agree.  Are you really doing to ask us to stop bonding over the only ideology we share?

If the White House is the People’s House, then Washington is the People’s Town; a melting pot of all the other states.  You come here; YOU populate the city.  And for all of you who are watching Washingtonians in disbelief, know that the same thing would happen to you if you took a government appointment and moved to our town.  This is like the Bermuda Triangle of Weather Functionality.  People come here, capable of getting through rain, snow, sleet, and hail.  And once they sign a lease on an apartment, they lose whatever coping mechanisms they came with from their original town.  It disappears, only to return once you exit DC because your job is over.

I haven’t been out of my house in two days.  I don’t want you to think I’m disgusting.  I mean, I showered both days.  I just got back into my pyjamas after pulling my hair up into a bun so it wouldn’t drip on my freebie sweatshirt from a DC event.  Because it is practically ritual here.

The snow comes down; the city stops.

Now excuse me, Capital Weather Gang is telling me that we’re going to get snow again tomorrow.  I have to go get milk and bread to add to my milk and bread collection.