My Year Of Everything

We’re friends now, so I’m going to be honest: I am enjoying the shit out of “Eat, Pray, Love.”

It fuses my favorite elements of the strongest books in My Year Of Everything: the charming cultural confusion and hardcore food pornography of “A Year In Provence,” the spiritual curiosity of “The Unlikely Disciple,” the discipline and frankness of the Jacobs books. Yes, there are some Beha-esque displays of fancy book-learnin’. And yes, there is an unfortunate focus on her Italian-food-based weight gain. But otherwise she avoids the forced Guisewiteyness that sinks most of the younger, female MYOs. I’m hooked.

Just as Peter Mayle made me want to dig out my old French textbooks and eat a stick of butter, Elizabeth Gilbert makes me want to go to town on a Rosetta Stone Deluxe Italian package*. She gets, as Mayle gets, as I get, that learning idioms in another language can change your perspective. Hearing of amici stretti- or tight friends, where the tight would otherwise refer to clothing, so literally a friend who is worn snugly over your own skin- forces you to reexamine the meaning of friendship. Telling someone who doesn’t speak English that you’ve been there- in the sense of having experienced that person’s emotions before- makes you hear the phrase with young ears and highlights the suggestion that emotion is a place one can be led into and out of.

You know how in “Idiocracy,” Luke Wilson’s character speaks in complete sentences, and gets put in jail for “talkin’ like a fag?” The only thing remotely implausible about this scenario is that it happens 500 years in the future. I bet we could get there by early April. I get that language is fluid, but we seem to be on the fast track back to grunting**. This is a wild oversimplification, but it’s early on a Sunday morning and the coffee is making my fingers move more quickly than my brain: we’re divorcing and popping antidepressants at a shockingly high rate, we’re more frustrated and alienated from our neighbors than ever before. Is that because we don’t express ourselves? And is that because we don’t know our own language well enough to do it?

* And eat a stick of butter.

** Back we go to “Jersey Shore.” One of my favorite elements of the show is that the housemates take every single English idiom (e.g. coming out of the woodwork, blowing it out of the water, etc.) and repurpose it to mean “awesome partying.”