InsaneJournal

Current mood:	aggravated
Current music:	Stevie Wonder - A Time to Love
Entry tags:	africa, books, family

so, yeah
The thing that sucks about this illness is that I don't feel that bad, except in the mornings, so I feel guilty for not being in class. Then I think about how sick Merlin was, and I think "I can't risk doing that to someone else" and then I wonder if I'm just inventing excuses. But he was pretty much unconscious on the couch for two days, zombie-like and mute when he was awake and vomiting frequently, burning with fever. This is a bizarre illness, because it seems to have hit me and Malcolm very lightly, Matisse more severely (she's almost never sick) and Mum and Merlin worst. Usually, I get it as bad as Mum, and Malcolm is the one who vomits at the drop of a hat.

Mum rented some videos to make her feel better. We watched Monsters vs. Aliens (my suggestion; it's actually good!) WALL-E (overhyped in my opinion) and some episodes of Underdog, which Mum insists she loved when she was little ("how little?" Dad asked her, and she said "oh, maybe three" and we believed her because that was so not something we would've ever chosen to watch. I've lost my exposure-to-racist-cartoon-portrayals-of-Asians virginity now -- I mean, I'd seen the WW2 propaganda posters, but I hadn't heard the horrible accents. Oh, and there were "Indians" too, and believe me, those quotation marks do not begin to cover the wrongness here.)

Yesterday I picked up the copy of The Ear, the Eye and the Arm I bought on my birthday. It was a remarkable book. Here's the basic outline: the year is 2194, the place Zimbabwe, where three children who are perpetually confined to their parents' mansion to protect them from their father's many enemies sneak out for an adventure, get kidnapped, and end up spending a while enslaved in a former toxic waste dump, living with a group of people who have shut themselves off from the outside world to keep African tradition alive, and nearly being killed by evil interdimensional beings. Er, not at the same time, you understand. Meanwhile, a detective agency made up of three mutants -- the titular Ear, Eye and Arm -- is trying to track them down. It's my favorite genre, the coming-of-age story, set in a setting I'd never seen before. Oh, and it's not-so-subtly feminist, but if I told you much or any of why I'd be spoiling it, because all the Crowning Moments of Feminism are bits where a woman/girl suddenly does something cool when the narrative seemed to be leading up to a man/boy doing it, and they're mostly plot-relevant.

Incidentally, another book we got on my birthday was And Tango Makes Three, because Matisse insisted it was our patriotic duty. Sure enough, there's a good reason it was banned -- Merlin read it and soon announced that he wanted to be a penguin when he grew up. I knew it was promoting the penguin agenda!

Meanwhile, the world keeps on turning....