Jennifer > Recent Status Updates

"You don't realize how challenging it is to be a normal suburban kid, how am I supposed to stand out?" The context is a student who made up a difficult past so she could deliver a more impressive school speech. Sounds like the secular version of "testimony envy."

"They [the students] memorize the periodic table..." Speaking as a scientist, please don't do this. Making memorization unnecessary is the whole reason the periodic table was created and organized the way it is.

Just finished the first chapter with the long words defined in parentheses that so many reviewers complained about, and to me it's just fine because the chapter is mostly about Davi, who is trying to improve her verbal scores. I can easily imagine her doing something like this, especially because I maintain a vocabulary notebook of my own.

The two characters here may be complaining about "The Crucible," but I saw the movie version and thought it was phenomenal. Intense, and a little disturbing, but still phenomenal. Yes, I saw it much later in life than high school, but I think I would have appreciated it even if I had been exposed to it earlier. And I think plays should be watched and not just read, as performance is expected for this genre.

"Bartleby the Scrivener" mentioned! I was introduced to this short story in my college American lit class, and unlike the students in this book, I loved it. However, the students in the book are in high school, and I'm unsure how I would have responded to the story in high school.

Two memorable lines on the same page:

"How horrible...to not know the truth about your own life."
"'I can get married again...But he doesn't get a new sister.'" This take on inter-sibling relationships is interesting, and I hadn't thought of it like that before.

"This was mid-lockdown, when she only left the house for gin and toilet paper and taught her virtual classes..." Ooh, a post-pandemic novel. It's interesting to think that basically every realistic present-day character now needs a plausible backstory about how they spent 2020.

I make firecracker cocktails every Fourth of July and the layering is density-based. Grenadine (red) is densest, followed by blue curacao (blue), followed by vodka and lemon (white). Therefore, there is no way these drinks can be made such that the white layer is in the middle and the blue layer on top, as described on this page. It's physically impossible.

The term "withdrawing room" is making me feel unmoored in time here. The term was most popular in the 1600s but remained in use through the early 1700s. By the 1800s, it had been shortened to "drawing room." And in Trollope, it's established that one of the characters is affectedly old-fashioned when she insists on using "withdrawing room" instead of "drawing room."

The mention in the footnotes of "civilized Europe" being appalled by the casualties at Antietam (25,000) seems almost unreal given its role in the world wars to come. World War II was the bloodiest war in world history, with 80 million dead.