Julie Pippert: Using My Words

They are cute, these kittehs, but I now see that they are all a part of God's plan, my cross to bear, as it were. As I revealed in my post about how I know I am Chilean , I believe in the fair and equal balance of good and bad, which I hope/believe I can control through the Art of Self-Imposed Minor Suffering. If I have too good of a day or too much good comes, I'll spend the next day atoning, trying to bring my minor suffering back in line enough to mitigate any additional instances of major suffering. I'll drink my water without ice, and no flavoring of tea. I'll skip eye liner. I'll eat a Weight Watchers frozen meal instead of getting that Schlotzky's sandwich I want. I'll watch Duck Dodgers with the kids. As soon as good news came down the pipe, I know the bad will, too. I consider myself lucky because the universe likes me balanced in the middle, and I know it could be much worse on the other end. I could, for example, be the police officer who lost a h...

I am reading, no, savoring, Isabel Allende's memoir, My Invented Country . I am taking my time with this book, picking up small portions delicately, raising them to my eyes and mind with slow anticipation, chewing and digesting them lingeringly. Once, I considered myself an avid scholar of the magical realism genre. That was back in my scholar days---the late 80s and early 90s. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was king. I found Allende's House of the Spirits a pale imitation of his work. Why was magical realism so appealing to me? Nobody ever asked. However, Allende, in her memoir, has finally answered the question for me: I am a ghost of Chile, wandering the practical world with an imaginative mind fixated in superstition and surprise divined from stockpiles of observation. Chileans, Allende asserts, offset their superstition, sobriety and natural intolerance with a love of regulation, "I believe this obsession of ours with legality is a kind of safeguard against the aggression we...