Little things

Canadian medal update: lucky 13, comprised of two gold, six silver and five bronze.

I think I finally have a reasonably sold first draft of my Red Dragon essay. I’ve been pushing sentences and paragraphs around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle where I don’t know what the picture looks like. I knew what I wanted to say, but not the through-line of how I was going to approach it. Sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into a logical flow—and I think I finally got there. It still needs work, but it’s right on target for word count and it reads from beginning to end like something that’s out to make a point or two instead of a random jumble of ideas.

I received an e-mail this morning that got the day off to a good start. It was from an 11^th grade student taking a class on Critical Thinking at a magnet school in Tennessee. Their class has apparently been discussing my Borderlands story “One of Those Weeks,” and they had some questions about it for me to address. I was tickled to think that people who don’t know me or anything about me are studying something I wrote. Quite a thrill.

The Closer posed some interesting questions last night, without arriving at any answers. What do you do if your child is a monster? They abstracted the question a little by making the teenaged sociopath a Russian adoptee, which gave the father permission to take actions he might not have otherwise, but still. There was good tension between Pope and the others about how to handle what seemed like a missing persons case in the light of their discoveries about his personality. Ultimately he was both victimizer and victim, at least as far as the case was concerned. Interesting subtext, too, about Fritz and Brenda’s discussions over the size of the house they were looking for and whether the quality of the school districts should play into their decisions.

In Plain Sight ended much as it started: with far too much emphasis on the histrionics of Mary’s family. The episode ground to a long, long halt while they nattered over Mary’s holier-than-thou attitude even as the FBI was preparing to bring down indictments against her sister. Way to keep the priorities straight. Unless I’m really bored next summer, I think I’m going to drop this show.

I finished up and posted my review of Real World by Natsuo Kirino last night. It’s an interesting look into the pressure Japanese teenagers face to excel, amplified by a matricide and the ensuing coverup.