My mom was driving me and Percy and my dog to t-ball practice today and there was this really weird story on NPR about yawning, about this professor guy who tried to design and record the 100% Perfect Yawn--a yawn so yawny and lazily contagious that anyone who heard it would just instantly stop what they were doing, open their mouth, stretch their arms or paws behind their heads, and Yaaawwwhnnnn.
Ah.
But there was a problem and the problem was this: no matter how good the yawns were that he was taping, no matter how loud or quiet, whether they played them with video or just with the sound, no matter what angle or how wide people yawned, no matter what the scientists did only 55% of people hearing or watching the tape yawned. 55%. They kept seeing that number (55%) over and over, and they couldn't do better. It was incredibly, incredibly frustrating for them. It must have felt, for them, like an unfinished yawn, 45% of which laid down in their diaphragms, heavy and sleepy and not budging an inch.
What, if you were a psychology professor devoting your life to yawning, could be more frustrating than that? Perhaps this: I, a ten year old living outside of Cleveland, have discovered the 100% Perfect Yawn, a yawn so contagious that anyone who even glimpses it involuntarily and immediately yawns and falls asleep. It is 557 pages long, was published in 2001, and it is 100% Perfect at making you, your dog, the person who wrote it, yawn like an abyss. It is a yawn in prose. It is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
How did I, Tamilda, a 10yr old, end up reading a book like The Corrections? Well it happened like this: my principal had an nervous breakdown. Because she was an elementary school principal it is safe to say that her psyche was already teetering on the edge of whatever table or armoire psyches normal sit on. In first grade, for example, I once peeked into her office and saw her running around waving a red high heeled shoe in the air at what I, crouched and peeking, took to be a bat because Principal Mendez shouted at least twice that she wished "[it] would just materialize already so that [she] could drive a wooden stake through [its] bloody heart!!!" Meaning that she thought the bat was a vampire that could somehow "materialize," even though that's not exactly what vampires do (they metamorphose). Also, she was wielding a red high heeled shoe at the walls and ceiling and framed diplomas, not a wooden stake. Also, there was no bat.After a minute or so the secretary saw me crouching and gawking and recording ever detail of this for future use with what was already, at age six, a pretty astounding memory, and told me to "shoo" with one hand as she secretly gave me a long waxy Tootsie Roll with the other. The point of this anecdote being that my principal, Mrs. Mendez, was well on her way to Crazyville well before the No Child Left Behind standards kicked into high gear and caused her to decide that our entire schoolwide curriculum would revolve around Fractions and the War of 1812, which she saw as somehow related.
I know more about Fractions and the War of 1812 than most PhD's who've written dissertations on the War of 1812 or Fractions (if such PhD's exist), and therefore when I sit at my desk listening to my teacher or some overeager bleeding heart graduate student volunteer lecture my class on Andrew Jackson or the number 11/20 I am literally bored out of my mind. And when I use the word literally I mean it literally: my mind literally crawls out of my head and wanders around the school, snooping into teacher's desks, into their purses, into the lunch box of the kid whose parents have a maid. My mind can do that, and that is how I ended up reading The Corrections.
On one such day, a week ago, my mind crawled out of my head, walked down the hallway, ran its fingernails along the grout between the tiles, pulled the sharp odor of antiseptic wax into its nostrils, and angled into the teacher's lounge where it began rifling, as my bored-out-of-its-mind-mind was wont to do, through the teachers' personal belongings. Lipstick, chapstick, tissues, pictures of ugly children the teachers hid from us--the usual. But then, tucked into the side pocket of Mrs. Saunders' faux-Louis Vuitton, something unusual: the 100% Perfect Yawn. My mind slipped it out of the bag, thumbed through it, read the back cover, and tried to figure out what a woman whose official job was titled District and Regional Grade Normer could be doing reading a book described as "Frighteningly, luminously authentic."
It must, my mind decided, have been some sort of cruel play on words--The Corrections, Grade Normer: get it?--given to her by the art teacher the previous Xmas in the Secret Santa exchange. As I thought about reading it, flipping it back and forth in my mind's hands, there was suddenly a noise, back in the classroom. My mind dropped the book, sailed along the waxy scents of the hallway and then leaped straight back into my head and peeked out of my eyes just in time to see Hilary Fuentes swivel down in her seat, place her hand to the side of her mouth as though she were about to the tell the floor a secret, and puke all over the tan linoleum, apparently out of pure boredom. Her mind, it seems, can't wander quite as freely as my own.
But back to Jonathan Franzen's 100% Perfect Yawn. I was soooo bored by the Fractions and the War of 1812 that--and recall, children were literally puking out of boredom--my mind would climb out of my head, walk down the hall, pick up The Corrections, and read it for 6 hours a day every day for a week. That is, 6/24 = 1/4 = a solid quarter of my day was spent with Jonathan Franzen, who supposedly wrote the book while blindfolded. By the way, I normally read much faster, around 180pp/hr, but that's when it's me sitting with the book in my lap, reading words on a page--having your bored-out-of-your-mind-mind read it several doors down the darkened hallway takes considerably more time and energy and patience.
But I did read it. I read every single word that Franzen wrote, and I yawned. I read those words and I wished for something else, anything else, even Strong Motion, and I yawned. I read that whole damn book all the way to the end, and boy oh boy did I yawn. Life became, through that book, a living yawn, a static yawn, like how Michael Bolton breathes in through his nose and out through his saxophone for days and days on end. That was me, except that my saxophone was a 557 page book about a horribly unhappy family. It truly was the 100% Perfect Yawn and had it gone on for two hundred more pages I don't doubt that it would have been infinite. A black hole yawn that could swallow life, the universe, and everything.
But at least I didn't puke--I can say that much for the book.
(I'm just joking. I didn't read any of that book--I wasn't that bored. I read the 4322 page District and Regional Grade Norming Handbook instead.)
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