7 posts tagged “books”

Dishwasher was my other new book purchase, inspired by a mention on NPR. Incidentally, that's how we found out about Fido, the movie we saw last weekend. I am pretty happy with the NPR results thus far.

What's the book about? Well, it's about a dishwasher. Duh. Young Pete wants the most slack job he can find. Turns out busting out dishes is pretty slack. Since it's so easy to get a job washing dishes and so hard to hire a person who is willing to wash dishes, Pete gets a perverse thrill from the job. He can get away with murder (not that he mentions actually having murdered anybody). The cooks make free meals for him. He can come in whenever he wants, leave for long breaks in the middle of a slow shift, and eat lots of discarded food from the bus tubs. He can even walk out of a job whenever he wants and it will have no effect on his ability to get another job. This is the perfect career for Pete's sensibilities.

That is not very interesting by itself. Pete has another ambition. He wants to see life outside of San Francisco, the city where he was raised. He gets it into his head to combine his dream job with his rambling man dreams and wash dishes in every one of the fifty states. That makes the book interesting.

Pete Jordan is a curious mix of traits.

He is the embodiment of the irritating slacker who comes in hung over (if he bothers to come in at all). You have to work a double shift because of him. You feel like a complete twit busting dishes at 6am and knowing that you're still going to be there at 10pm. Not only that, but you declined an invitation to a party last night because you wanted to wake up in time for work, while he didn't let the overshadowing doom of a morning shift get in his way. Your only consolation is the knowledge that he is sure to stop showing up within a couple of weeks and replaced by a (hopefully) more industrious washer. I'm older and wiser now, and I don't hate that guy as much as I used to. I wish I had spent more time cultivating precious slack instead of working hard for a crap paycheck. It still rubs a raw nerve when I read about his exploits in the dish pit, though.

But Dishwasher Pete is also a strangely driven fellow. He is driven to pursue his quest. He wanders the breadth and length of the country dishing everywhere he goes. It is not easy to do such wandering on a dishwasher's wages. Ask anybody who has ever worked as a dishwasher. Heck, ask me. I could barely wander the breadth and length of a town on my wages as a dishwasher. Pete is an unusually clever and resourceful fellow who finds a way to follow his dream to a cannery in Alaska, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a dinner train on the East Coast, and a kids' summer camp overlooking Lake Tahoe. He doesn't just wash, either. Pete runs a little zine all about washing dishes, which is eventually read by some 10,000 people. He meets folks. He makes friends. He gets fans. He releases an album, sort of. He finds work in towns that have no interest hiring a guy like him. He learns the history of dishwashing and dishwashers, sometimes poring for hours in a library to uncover a new gem. He becomes a very good dishwasher indeed, mastering the all-important art of getting the most done with the minimum of exertion (you have to pace yourself, or you won't have enough energy for that last rush of dishes when the cooks break down the kitchen).

And somehow at the end, when he's burned out on busting suds and trying to figure out what sort of job would look good enough to get a mortgage for him and his true love - the woman who could love a man who washes dishes for a living - somehow, you sort of like the driven, oddly idealistic slacker bastard.

I liked the book. His style was great, even more so because of the times that I wanted to reach into the book and strangle him. It's not perfect. Stuff is certainly missing. There is no mention of NPR despite the fact that he was a recurring subject on This American Life. Maybe I like his book because of the fact that I washed dishes long enough to occasionally feel that moment where it felt like I had the perfect job. Washing dishes demanded everything from my body and nothing from my mind. It's like Zen, except it's the sort of Zen where you end the day scalded, aching, and with hair that somehow smells like a zombie barnyard might. Here's a guy who understood it, and knew what to do with it. Every aspiring slacker should read this book to see one way to slack right.

Here's wishing the best success to Pete and Amy in their newish home of Amsterdam.

And remember, your local NPR station provides more than light jazz and soft-spoken news.

I allowed myself a new book today, since I have read a couple of old ones. This is actually a new edition of a book we used to own. The first edition of Dad's own cookbook helped Brooke and I immensely. Brooke also credits some of our first-year food joy to Help, My Apartment Has a Kitchen!, but Dad's own is the one that taught me a lot of the little details:

• Different ways to cook different kinds of fish
• The different cuts of beef
• How to make the perfect macaroni and cheese.

This book has some of my favorite all time recipes:

• Mac and cheese (maybe you guessed from the other list)
• Mediterranean oven fried chicken
• Beef fajitas

Alas, we had do sell our copy of Dad's own and several other cookbooks a couple of years ago when times were tight and we needed a few bucks to continue eating. I saw this one the other day in the Barnes and Noble and decided today to buy it. I'd already zipped through the whole thing by the time we got home from our evening out at University Village (where we grabbed sushi off of a conveyor belt at Blue C and examined books at yet another Barnes and Noble).

The new edition has the same information, along with a few more recipes and details that I don't recall being in the first edition. The one that really jumps out at me is a full-page table listing different foods and how long they keep in the fridge or freezer. It's possible that the information was already in the first edition and I'd just forgotten about it. After a few years' absence, a lot had been forgotten. But the presentation is definitely better. And the writing style is still great. You are presented with the basics, but in a fashion that doesn't make you feel like hopeless idiot.

Yeah. Get this book if you're about to move out on your own and need a good all-purpose cookbook that gives recipes for food you might actually want to eat.

"Persepolis" is another of the biographical graphic novels that have been floating around. It's more interesting than most, though. The author is an Iranian woman who was about ten years old during the revolution that resulted in the Shah's overthrow. It's a completely different perspective of life in Iran during that time, and also provides a good amount of history. It took me a while to get through, but it was worth the trouble. I'll probably revisit this one later.

"Transmetropolitan Vol 1: Back on the Street" doesn't have the same intensity as "Persepolis" but I found it to be an excellent treatment of relatively near future science fiction. It has your classic gritty anti-hero, but he's not a criminal mastermind, soldier, cop, or psionically gifted orphan. He's a violently antisocial former reporter who is only returning to his profession to get material for books he's been contracted to write for years. I'm curious where the rest of the series goes.

"Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules" has since been renamed to "Intermediate Perl," but I still had this first edition as part of my Perl library on CD ROM. It's a good follow-up to "Learning Perl" and it would be a good idea for aspiring Perl hackers to go straight from that book to this one - or its current successor, at least.

I still have a lot of books to read.

The whole series is a lot of fun. Sex, violence, humor, and not so much of the goth-poetry-inspiring self-loathing of the Anne Rice books (they were good once, even twice, but after that it became dull quickly). I am well into the series now, and I'm still enjoying it immensely. Alan Ball (he of American Beauty and Six Feet Under) is producing a television series based on the books. I'm looking forward to it.

The small procrastination is that I should be doing my employee self-evaluation right now. Guess I'll go do that.