Back in August, I purchased the e-book of my friend Jane Devin – a memoir titled Elephant Girl.

I was introduced to Jane’s blog by a friend and easily became entranced by the way she wrote.  Lyrical, gorgeous, emotional and heartbreaking.  Thoughtful…thought-provoking.  Over several months, we became online friends via Twitter and Facebook and would have good discussions about beauty and life’s purpose.  I was excited as I followed her progress through writing and self-publishing her memoir.  I didn’t know exactly what was coming but I knew it would be beautifully written.  I was not disappointed.

I’ve been lucky, I thought to myself again and again as I read this book.  I’ve been lucky to have a family to love me,  a community that supported me and friends that listened and judged very little.  I’m very lucky because this book was a heavy reminder that not all people are afforded such luxuries.  Some people don’t have loving parents and are failed by their community again and again and again.

Elephant Girl is about one woman’s struggle in a world often dominated by the idea that women are meant to be small and quiet, where strength of character is seen as a flaw, fighting back means you get hit harder and love is not offered easily, if at all.  But Elephant Girl isn’t just a story about a hard life, bad luck, unfortunate circumstances and cruel treatment at the hands of strangers and family.  It isn’t just the story of one person, but about each of us together – about the challenges we face in growing up.  Not becoming an adult, but that constant, life-long growing up that is oftentimes confusing, painful and overwhelmingly difficult.  There is no manual and there is no how-to.  We’re just out here, walking a path, sometimes struggling to make it one step further, sometimes bounding along, sometimes alone and later, crowded by others.  It’s about how we’re all here, trying our best, and succeeding and failing all at the same time.

Elephant Girl is as much a memoir as it is a conversation about what it means to be human.  Jane Devin shares one belief, one perspective, and offers a road-map of how she arrived at her own truth.  She doesn’t force us to believe it ourselves, but offers herself up as an example.  Here is one human life, precious and perfect even in its imperfections.  It’s about how life can leave us feeling like there is no road left to travel, no more heart left to break, no more will to propel us forward and when we’re at the bottom of the deepest and darkest hole we have ever known, we can reach to a place deeper inside us than we knew existed and find a sliver of hope that compels us to grab on to the walls and start our climb again.

As I read Elephant Girl I found myself becoming overwhelmed with feelings of deep sadness.  My heart ached for a little girl, a teenager and then a grown women, for society, for each of us.  I was devastated that people could behave so cruelly toward another human being.  It read like a tidal wave crashing again and again in the same place, and it left me wondering…how much is too much?  How is this even possible that one person could survive all life’s cruelties and still have the strength to relive it?

I am still stunned that for as emotionally difficult and raw as this book is, it was a fast and fantastic read.  I devoured the words at every spare moment – lunch breaks, stop lights, in waiting rooms and before bed.  I cried myself to sleep several times because the sadness was palpable and overwhelming.  When finished, I felt a sense of relief because a life so filled with moments of destruction and despair coupled with the beautiful and complicated love between a mother and daughter and moments of resurrection led Jane Devin, this beautiful Elephant Girl, to one of life’s simplest and greatest truths: we are who we are – and the relationships worth our energy and effort are with those who accept us just as we are, sharp bits and all.  If I found one piece of my own truth in this book, it was just that.

So, this book I can’t shut up about (which I  mentioned several weeks ago) is about fruit.  Mostly about ultra-exotic fruits and the people who hunt them.  That’s why it’s called Fruit Hunters.  See what he did there?  He’s clever…calling it what it is.  Not everyone does that.  Like this doctor I once saw named Phuc Dat.  As it turns out, he really doesn’t want to phuc dat.  Not even as a joke.

I digress.  In the book about fruit and fruit hunters there is discussion of a certain group of people who only ever eat fruit.  Those people are called fruitarians.  Also, they’re called INSANE because last time I checked, cheese and cupcakes weren’t fruits and what the hell do you have against cheese and cupcakes, motherfuckers!?

Some fruitarians will only eat fruit if it has fallen from the tree.  They will not pick it themselves.  But OH.  OH NO.  It’s gets weirder.  Some fruitarians will not even eat the seeds because they contain “future plants.”  Listen.  I like fruit as much as the next guy.  I’m also actually pretty picky about the fruit I eat because I don’t like the texture of ripened, soft, juicy fruits.  I like my fruits tart and hard.  So I get the idea that fruit is delicious.  I like it better that broccoli and celery and all those other vegetable I can’t be bothered to eat anymore.  I can understand the idea of not eating anything but fruit.  It sounds fun.  I can see doing it as a cleanse and then maybe I have diarrhea for three days because WOW.  Fruit.  Dangerous to the bottom system.  Fine. But, a lifestyle?  A LIFESTYLE?  It’s worse that being gay, is all I’m saying.  If being gay is an abomination, than being a fruitarian is like being gay twice.  You’re gay and you’re gay again because that’s how ridiculous it is to eat fruit for the rest of your life and to pick every seed out because it’s a “future plant.”  You’re gay and you’re gay again and then you’re bombing abortion clinics because they’re future people.  Also, on top of all that, you’re a homosexual.  GAYS ARE BAD!

This is a gross side note that is in the book, too.  One native culture was fruitarian, but really only out of necessity.  They only ever had fruit to eat.  Even the fruit was pretty scarce because, I think, they were in some desert somewhere.  I can’t be bothered to look it up in the book that is sitting right here next to me even if I did read it only like 4 pages ago.  Since food was so hard to come by, they picked the seeds out of their feces and made some sort of seed pulp and ate that.  WHAT. THE. HELL.  Congratulations to you for being creative, I guess, and staying alive.  I wouldn’t have noted that in the history books, though.  Because now some crazy lady in Seattle only knows of you as those Fruitarians that ate shit seeds.

One famous fruitarian, not counting Ghandi who did it for 5 years before quitting because of health issues, is a gentleman named Johnny Lovewisdom.  He also experimented with other extreme diets including, my personal favorite, Breatheairianism.  And yes, it is exactly what it sounds like, which is probably why Johnny is now dead.  Also, one of the more recent and notable Breatheairianists was caught with a house full of food and though she blamed it on her husband – I feel pretty certain she was eating it, because she had Cheetos dust all over her face.  I made that up, but that’s not what matters.  What matters is that you can’t live on breathing air and I’ll prove it to you in several days after I test your stupid theory on Carson.  Then you’ll be sorry.  But I won’t.

As you can probably guess, fruitarians often suffer from malnutrition because their diets do not include some very important nutrients including “calcium, protein, iron, zinc, vitamin D, most B vitamins (especially B12), and essential fatty acids,” though one creative gentleman mentioned in the book said he gets his B12 from cunnilingus and don’t worry, that’s probably the last time you’ll see that word on this website but I’m pretty sure it’ll bring some fascinating Google searchers. In addition, many fruitarians claim that their diet helps them develop direct communication with God but, really, let’s be honest.  If I had that much sugar – natural or otherwise – I’d think  I could talk to God, too.  I mean, I just ate some fruit snacks and I’m pretty sure  Metatron and Archangel Michael are having a fistfight in the hallways outside my office.

Also, my mother and I had a little conversation about this website and my liberal use of the word “whore” wherein she expressed her displeasure in my liberal use of the word “whore” and I giggled because my mom just said the word “whore” like five times.

To close this brief snippet and to further ignore the reasons for my longer than usual absence, I’d like to share with you an interesting tidbit surrounding the tomato.  I am reading a cool book about fruit and in that book there is a brief mention of the 1893 US Supreme Court Case Nix v Hedden.  My friend Carrie helpfully forwarded me the Wikipedia page from which I lifted this snippet for you:

The court unanimously decided in favor of the defense and found that the tomato was classified as a vegetable, based on the ways in which it is used, and the popular perception to this end. Justice Horace Gray, writing the opinion for the Court, stated that:

“The passages cited from the dictionaries define the word ‘fruit’ as the seed of plants, or that part of plants which contains the seed, and especially the juicy, pulpy products of certain plants, covering and containing the seed. These definitions have no tendency to show that tomatoes are ‘fruit,’ as distinguished from ‘vegetables,’ in common speech, or within the meaning of the tariff act.”

Justice Gray cited several different Supreme Court cases and stated that when words have acquired any special meaning in trade or commerce the ordinary meaning must be used by the court. In this case dictionaries cannot be admitted as evidence, but only as aids to the memory and understanding of the court. Gray acknowledged that botanically, tomatoes are classified as a “fruit of the vine”, nevertheless they are seen as vegetables because they were usually eaten as a main course instead of being eaten as a dessert. In making his decision, Justice Gray mentioned another case where it had been claimed that beans were seeds — Justice Bradley, in Robertson v. Salomon, similarly found that though a bean is botanically a seed, in common parlance a bean is seen as a vegetable. While on the subject, Gray clarified the status of the cucumber, squash, pea, and bean.

The book is titled The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession.

In my attempts to get past this image of an arrogant genius that has kept me from enjoying his epic novel, I decided to participate in a project called Infinite Summer. It’s a group of people who are dedicated to reading Infinite Jest over the summer, about 75 pages per week, and then discussing it, as a community.

Last night Janie brought the book home from the library. She read me the first paragraph as I chopped up some vegetables.  I have no idea what it was about. Something about someone in a room with some people?

Anyhow, if you’re interested in reading this book in much the same way you were interested in following that Oprah 21 day cleanse with me, meaning you want to torture yourself for weeks, join me…join us all…let us read this book and talk about it and then feel smug for having done so. Maybe after all is said and done, in the wee hours of a September morning, we will forgive David Foster Wallace for that afternoon in 1997 when the only thing memorable he ever said was that he didn’t watch TV except for the episodes of Ally McBeal that his friends taped for him.

In honor of that day, and of librarians across the land, let me share some library facts with you (via Wikipedia):

The first two libraries, in ancient Sumer and in Egypt, were repositories for archives, mostly comprised of inventories and commercial transactions.

Private libraries first appeared in Greece in the 5th century BC.

The first Western public libraries were created under the Roman Empire, where readers had access to scrolls in either Greek or Latin.

In China, during the Han Dynasty, they created the first library classification system, written on silk scrolls. Fancy!

Library catalogs were first introduced in medieval Islamic libraries. Books were organized by genre and category.

Ancient libraries employed copiers who spent their days toiling away, hand-copying texts.

In 1876, in the United States, the American Library Association was formed and Melvin Dewey gave us the decimal system.

Check out Wikipedia’s list of famous librarians

Check out these library photos

Don’t forget to purchase your librarian action figure from Archie McPhee, based on real Seattle librarian and author Nancy Pearl!