When I went over to the familial manse for Father’s Day on Sunday (still slightly nursing a colossal hangover from Thursday night, but don’t tell Kim) my slightly-more-recently-hungover idiot brother and I hung out in the basement for a little while shooting hoops and discussing the future.

I said, “I can’t believe I’m going to be moving again. Again. I just can’t believe it.”
He sunk a shot and said, without turning around, “I can’t believe you’re moving like eight hundred books. Again.”

I made an appropriate rejoinder* and followed him upstairs for a delicious salmon dinner and no more was said. But like seriously. I’m starting to pack said infinite number of books now and also getting ready for a short jaunt to the exotic wilds of central Canada and here is the thing.

I do own a lot of books. I don’t like getting books from the library because I can’t carry home enough books to satisfy my burning desire to choose. Do you know what it means to not be satisfied, ever, with the things that surround you? I have that. Is that a recognized disease or something?

Take, for instance, just now. I have four boxes of books packed and eleven full shelves to go, so about nine more boxes if I pack them neatly and don’t just throw them in willy-nilly. For my trip, I will have the plane ride to Montreal, the train trip to Ottawa, then the plane ride back from Ottawa, plus sundry just-before-bed reading and whatever dead time I suffer at the airports/train stations/etc.

Here is the inner dialogue as I stooped over one of the bookshelves not yet emptied a few minutes ago:

OK. That’s like twelve or fifteen hours of dead time, hey? I’d better take two books.
Two books should be fine. But they can’t be any of the books I’m currently reading. I’m too close to being done all of them.
OK. So two unstarted books.
OK. Agreed.
Yay! We have an agreement!
One non-fiction and one fiction?
Yep, fine.
Yay! We have an agreement!
How about…a Pratchett?
No, I’ll be done it too fast, and then I’ll want to read the other book right away. You know it’s like Chinese food, you’re all stuffed and happy and then an hour later you’re hungry again.
How about… Les Miserables?
Too heavy. And don’t point at Ulysses either. I want books I can travel with.
But you can’t take anything too thin either, or you’ll be done it too soon.
Crap. OK. Let’s just go ahead and eliminate hardbacks and all books over 500 pages.
That’s fine. That still leaves about 500 books.
Dammeeeeet. How about this one, I haven’t read this one yet – “Gulag,” Anne Applebaum.
Nothing that will make you cry on the plane, dude.
OK, so that leaves about… 450 books.
How about the last book in that ‘West of Eden’ series? You were putting off reading that.
Yeah, but I put it off too long and now I can’t remember important plot details from the first two books.
OK, so that eliminates a couple of other series too.
I think we’re down to about 400 books to choose from.
Fine. What have we got here… how about ‘In Defense of Sin’?
Oh! No, wait. No anthologies. There’s always bound to be a few in there I don’t like, then that ruins my enjoyment of the rest.
That’s OK, that’s only eliminates about 10 books. 390.
390 is still a lot.
How about this one. ‘The Sweet Hereafter’ – you liked that one, didn’t you?
Yeah, but you also have to be in the mood. That one’s out.
How about… gee, there’s a lot of books about the Third Reich here, aren’t there.
No. Not taking ‘Hitler’ on the plane.
You might get an empty row after your seatmates request reassignment.
True… oh, how about this one. ‘White Noise’ – that was super good, right?
It was but it also scared my pants off. Nothing scary.
So… down to about 350. OK, how about this one.
The Book of Mormon? No. Why do I even own a copy of the Book of Mormon?
Same reason you’ve got that old King James, I bet.
Actually I clearly remember buying that one because of all the male nudes in the illustrations. Here, check that action out.
Best I’ve had in ages. How about ‘Concepts of Forest Entomology’?
Har har. Nothing textbooky, wise guy.
So, uh… let’s call that about 300.
I think both the fiction and the nonfiction need to be totally escapist and absorbing. Nothing I have to kill myself analyzing, nothing preachy.
Nothing preachy? Well that eliminates all the Jewish novelists and anybody with a Nobel.
That’s fine. How many does that leave?
Uh, like 175 books.
Aaaaack! How did we get down so low?

And then I came in here and started writing this post to calm down. Can you see my problem? Can you see why I suspect a disease? Do normal people do this before a week-long trip? It is of a craziness.

(The title, by the way, refers to a theory that Martin Amis’ character Richard Tull expounds on in ‘The Information.’ Richard’s best friend has recently developed a series of annoying tics and twee quirks which Richard blames on the Maggot Theory – that the friend has a maggot in his brain and all the grimaces and pouts and overpreciousness is due to the maggot wandering and munching its way through his prefrontal cortex. My theory, which is similar, involves a nest of parasitic wasps. Really just a matter of scale, as I suspect there may be too many things wrong with me to be explained away by a single maggot’s meals.)

*Found a Matchbox car on the floor and threw it at him.

1. Just got back from the downtown farmer’s market with a bagful of Montreal-style bagels, jam, chutney, soap, and jerky. The rhubarb is so lovely I was tempted to buy a metric ass-ton of it – but then what do I do with it afterwards? Pie is all I can think of.

2. I remembered that I was supposed to post this video. Why should you watch it, you ask? Because:

a) Rob and Fab were totally hot.
b) Actiiiiiinnnnnnnng!!
c) Deep and meaningful lyrics.
d) Legging manpris.
e) I told you to.

I was over at my friend Blonde’s house last Friday and we somehow got to talking about abstinence-only sex education, to which – as your bog-standard educated circa 1987 to 1998 Albertans – we had never been subjected.

“I wonder what that might involve,” I said. “Isn’t it kind of an oxymoron? It’s like they’re declaring a total absence of education ‘abstinence-only education.’ What do they do, sit there in the classroom three hours a week not thinking about sex? With the teacher pointing at a blank chalkboard?”

“Oh, Premee! Chalkboards. Really.”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

We agreed that it wasn’t worth looking up abstinence-only curricula online, and proceeded to eat our pizza while she told me the story of a homeschooled friend of hers from rural Alberta (keep in mind we were in Bon Accord on Friday, which I consider to be rural Alberta) who had gotten pregnant quite young, aged seventeen. When Blonde went to visit her and the baby about five months later, it crucially transpired that Homeschooled Friend was under the following impressions:

- That you cannot ever get pregnant during your period
- That you can, in fact, only get pregnant one day a month
- That the pull-out method is more reliable than condoms
- That spermatozoa die in very short order upon entering the vagina (or etc.)

It also transpired that at the time of that meeting, Homeschooled Friend was pregnant with her second child. Oy vey.

I said, “Holy moly. Not like we got the full picture at a Catholic junior high, but seriously, when I was thirteen years old I still knew pulling out was a recipe for disaster.”

She said, “I know! It just seems so… backward.”

We agreed that the parents had done her a grave disservice not in homeschooling her, but in skipping practical anatomy lessons during the hormone-clouded years of puberty. If Homeschooled Friend had known about her monthly cycles, and the uterine lining, and male physiology, and the biological purposes of all the tangled tubes below the belt, would she still have been a two-time unwed teen mother living in her parents’ basement? Probably not.

So that discussion was only one reason that Bill 44 (pdf) Section 11 makes me uneasy, and glad that I’m not a parent… or a teacher.

Here am I, Miss McTeacherson, at the front of my grade-ten science class. I say, “Today we’re starting the chapter on evolution and speciation. Please turn to page – “

And someone’s hand shoots up in the front row. “Miss M! I forgot. I have a note for today.” He slides out of his desk and, with a mild but discernible grimace of embarrassment, hands me the form signed by his parents saying he won’t be attending this class due to ‘religious reasons.’ The ‘Explanation’ line is blank.

Uh.

“This material is going to be on the final exam, Timmy. You don’t have to leave the classroom.”

All the kids are staring at our whispered exchange now, lots of wide eyes and zits and identical battered textbooks. Timmy mutters, “I don’t want to get in trouble or anything.”

He leaves. We turn to page 107 and I open the lecture with tectonic plates. Everybody’s cheeks are flushed with adrenaline, but no one seems to know why, or when it will stop. I go home and worry about my job for five weeks, till we’re done evolution and have gone on to cell biology – to which Timmy’s parents evidently have no objections.

I could see it getting really over-the-top. What if there are anti-Semitic parents who pull their kids out of history class because Jews might be discussed when learning about the Middle East? What if I want to raise my child to think that there’s no such thing as the sexual spectrum? What if I don’t ‘believe’ in vaccination, and there’s a unit in Bio 30 about immunology? Do I pull the kid because I don’t want him to learn about T4 cells and herd immunity and the eradication of smallpox? Do I pull the kid from English class because they’re reading a book containing two characters who conduct an extramarital affair? Or because their literature anthology for the year contains three odes from gay poets, and I don’t want him to realize that gay people don’t actually spend all their time prancing around in mesh shirts like I taught him? Can I pull him from physics because Einstein had mistresses, and that offends me? Where does it stop? Can my kid go to public school at all if I happen to be a broad-spectrum ideological zealot? Or will I spend all my time suing teachers, principals, assistants, and school boards?

Welcome to Alberta! Freedom to repress, spirit to subdue.