"When I was young and dumb--even dumber than I am now--I spent a summer as a live-in staff member at a prestigious, World's-Top-Hideaways-list-making New Zealand luxury lodge, waiting tables and working housekeeping. For a hundred bucks a week in my pocket. This is one of the numerous downsides to having incredibly shitty parenting; no one to tell you, when you are young and dumb, that it is illegal for employers to pay less than minimum wage, that legally the lodge was allowed to charge me 9% of my gross wage for room and board and not a cent more, and that I was about to be exploited all to hell. Ah, rich people.

Before I arrived I dreamed of long summer evenings, hanging out with the other staff, swimming in the river, finding a cute local summer boyfriend, and having a great growth experience. Reality was slightly different. I was the only staff member living on site, no one hung out together, the lodge was a billion miles from civilisation (duh) and I only had a pushbike, all the male staff were married, and the locals were hostile (again, duh!).

That was the first Christmas Day I spent without seeing another human being. Also without eating anything, because staff meals were in the kitchen, which was (triple duh) closed for the day, because the whole lodge was closed for the day, and this had not occurred to me, literally, until Christmas morning.

Well, thank fuck for Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger series. If I was prepared to turn myself into a sweat-dripping, overheated mess (and I was) I could cycle into the tiny local public library (where I BEGGED to be allowed to join, against all the residency rules: thank you, kind librarian), and I read my way through their entire fiction section (it was one wall). I lived for each week's Spellsinger volume. What could have been more apt for me than a story about a fish-out-of-water human with hidden magic talents, transported to a strange and hostile land. The hope that I too could be a speshul snowflake kept me from crying more than once a week (maybe twice . . . okay, three times).

I have never tried to re-read the series, because I fear Spellsinger isn't actually objectively particularly amazing, but I still have an overstrong affection for the song Sloop John B, and call the tiny moving dots in the side of one's field of vision 'gneechees'.

Thanks, ADF.


"

"This is a partially-cooked loaf of something-or-other, propped up on shaky-ass stilts. I didn't love any of it, but I did return multiple times to this prescient bit of narration:

"I'm not ready for how much I miss people, after always wishing I could escape from them.... I've never been this far from a crowd before. Their loud voices, their inadvertent touches, and the scraps of personal information that people always give in passing. All the tiny ways that people help each other to exist.""