I'm looking for a YA book that I know I purchased from a remainders bin at a Tuesday Morning sometime in the mid-'90s (yes, I remember this, but not the author or title).

It was about a high-school girl, with an abusive father, who gets pregnant and runs away from home to have the baby. After she moves, she stays at a YMCA and gets a job as a waitress. The unique thing I remember about this book is that the restaurant where she works is run by a former doctor and only sells round food (i.e., burgers, pancakes, soup in a round bowl, etc.). A regular at the restaurant (who I think was an artist) eventually takes her in and in the end, she doesn't give up the baby for adoption, but the artist, the restaurant owner, and a few other people all decide they will all be a family and raise the baby together.

I've just helped my parents clean out their basement, including a box I thought this book would be in, so that was my last hope for finding it again, with the exception of the Vine readers. I hope it rings a bell for someone!

A

*****

Hiya Sars and Brilliant Nation!

When I was a little kid I had a cassette tape (really? I used those once?) that came with a book of children's songs that was fully awesome. I know there was a song called "Rainbow Made of Children" or something like that, and one about a kid taking a bath with a shark, where the chorus was "Mommy, help me! I'll be good, you'll see! Mommy, help me! Eek! Eek! Shark!" I think there was another song on there about "We dare not go a-hunting for fear of little men."

I've Googled those song lyrics I can remember, but and checked iTunes, but I'm coming up dry. The tape was really a lot of fun, and now that I've got cute little nephews, I'd like to be able to give them a CD of it. Surely I can't be the only 30-year-old who had that cassette?

Sincerely,

Sure, I want it for my "nephews"

I've got an embarrassing problem that I'm really hoping that you and the readers may be able to advise on. 

I'm a woman in my late twenties, and for years I have had a very noticeable problemswith facial hair on my chin, neck, side of face and lower cheeks (upper lip isn't a problem as I get it waxed off regularly and am not hung up about that. Also, I have unusually hairy arms etc., but I can hide that more easily so it's not such a big problem). Two years ago I went to the doctor to be checked for PCOS, but apparently don't have that.

I did a stupid thing and shaved the hair on my face off — and kept shaving it for a long time, so now when it grows back it's stubbly and feels/looks awful. I grew the hair out over the Christmas break and tried to get it waxed so it would come back finer and get rid of the stubbly look, but it didn't take – the beautician ended up plucking individual hairs out of my face for about half an hour and then had another appointment so I left in tears with a ton of hair still visible and went back to shaving it off again. 

My problem is twofold: firstly I'm not sure what to do about getting rid of this unwanted hair — everyone says don't shave it off, but what do I do when I've already been shaving for so long and created the whole stubble problem? How can I keep on top of it and stop it from being visible? I am so paranoid of other people noticing this, and hate seeing signs of the hair when I'm in bright settings. 

The second problem is the way I feel about the facial hair. I feel ugly and manly and freakish. I look at every woman I see and examine her face for signs of hair, and feel such jealousy for the smooth faces I see around me. I find it hard to imagine being in a relationship with a man — I feel repulsive and I worry that nobody will find me attractive with this problem, and if I did have a relationship, I wouldn't want the person I was with to touch my face and am not sure how I could avoid that. I can't let anybody touch my face because as soon as they feel the stubble they'll know. I can't spend the night with anybody because they'll see signs of the hair in the morning when I wake up. There's a man I like at the moment but when we talk I'm very self-conscious that he will notice the facial hair and I pull away from social situations when I'm feeling especially bad about my looks.

Realistically I know that not everybody is going to be examining my face for signs of hair and that nobody is going to care about my face as much as I do, but I still feel completely awful about the facial hair. And then I feel bad about feeling so awful because obviously there are worse problems that people can have, but at the moment this is hard and I'm struggling with it a lot. I don't know how to feel less bad about my facial hair, how to feel attractive when dealing with this, and what to do when navigating physical touch in personal relationships. 

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to read this,

C

Dear C,

First of all, give yourself a break for obsessing over it. Not from obsessing over it, although that too, because it's exhausting, but for it. Embracing your physical quirks proudly is a great goal, but nobody hits that every day no matter what they say. Today, my plural chins will isolate me, rightly and forever, from joy. You're human and you want to be perfectly pretty. That's just normal, irrational human-being business.

Now, to the business of depilation. PCOS isn't the only reason lady hair can go rogue (in either direction — it is possible for women to have male pattern baldness thanks to slightly elevated testosterone). It's sometimes easier to address a cosmetic problem if you know for sure what is (or is not) causing it medically, so go back to the GYN and also to an endocrinologist, make it clear why you're visiting, and if either/any doctor is making you feel bad for feeling bad about the hair, go to someone else who's on the team. Life is too short to pay a doctor who judges you for not wanting a beard.

Once you've cleared everything biologically, I think you'll feel better about the hair, not having it but feeling like you have some agency in it, and that will probably help a little bit with your self-consciousness. It won't eliminate it, but just keep reminding yourself, I am working on this, and also nobody notices these things as much as I do, and also also some guys dig a little wisp action, and it's going to be okay.

If you define "okay" as "no hair no how," I don't have a ton of experience with that. (Yet. The genetic tendency towards a billy-goat in the later years is probably waiting for me. Sigh.) You may want to visit a dermatologist or a laser clinic and have a consultation about permanent removal, or maybe your GYN will think you should go on the pill and that will thin things out, or maybe you want to try a chemical depilatory like Nair for a while and see if that's a more elegant solution than shaving. (Would threading help with this at all? I'm asking.) In the short term, stick with whatever has worked for you while you research other options.

Short form: don't feel bad about feeling bad; don't stay at the mercy of the problem, but take action, which will make you feel less bad; remember that the boy of your desiring has a third nipple, or thinks his ears are hideous, or something, because everyone does; remember also that straight boys just plain do not notice a lot of shit and also God invented low lighting because S/He loves us; and let's see what the readers can suggest about fuzz control that might work for you.

Nothing wrong with going natural with that, readers, if that's your thing, but today we're looking for that clean, close (non-)shave. Hit it.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is an overview of how Americans managed death, in response to a larger and more sustained barrage of it than anyone could have previously imagined.

Written by historian (and Harvard president) Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic is a hybrid of popular and academic history, and its citation style is occasionally rote — assertion; primary source, secondary, primary, rephrase; repeat — but structuring the book like a traditional thesis or paper is the best way to confront its vast, implacable subject. It parallels the ways Americans found to confront it, even down to the chapter headings ("Burying," "Naming," "Realizing," e.g.).

Faust's writing is excellent, setting a brisk but not disrespectfully rushed pace, and she doesn't get bogged down in establishing ownership of any one waterfront; completism isn't what's called for her, and she smartly doesn't try for it. Often, dozens of sources support a point about, for example, the "concept of the Good Death" — ars moriendi — that Victorian Americans counted on to bring order to the chaos and grief of the end of life. Other times, Faust follows a single source: the men tasked with "repatriating" Union dead to the national cemeteries; Ambrose Bierce, whose "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is legendary, and typical of how his wartime experiences tinted his writing with bitterness and horror ever after.

That balance is very readable, stale-proofing the prose and letting Faust play some deep cuts that even those with extensive grounding in the topic might not have heard. I didn't know anything about ars moriendi; I didn't know that, "as late as the first decade of the twentieth century, fewer than 15 percent of Americans died away from home" (9), hospitals then considered a place for "the indigent, not respectable citizens," to die; I didn't know George McClellan's maddening (to Lincoln, for one) aversion to engaging the enemy on the battlefield stemmed from an "aversion to killing" that makes him both more sympathetic and simply unfit for command. I didn't know much about Bierce, either, and Faust's description of his background and carefully selected passages of his work made me want to dig into his collected writings immediately:

Bierce was the tenth of thirteen children — all given names beginning with A — born to parents he seems to have despised. He enlisted in the Union army when he was only eighteen. … Bierce's writings about the war are preoccupied with the gruesome and the macabre and display what seems almost an eagerness to transgress proprieties of thought and representation. (196-7)

A detailed comment by Bierce about a man dying from a shot to the head, almost fetishistic in its hideous details, follows.

Faust is also very good in the aftermath, the portrayal of the vain attempt by quartermasters, War Department historians, and bereaved fathers to get arms around the sheer volume of death and waste. One man records each demise he can confirm, savoring the "peculiar" deaths as humanizing the mass: kicked to death by a mule, another bitten on the thumb and then exsanguinating after the infected digit was amputated, another "died of poison while on picket, by drinking form a bottle found at a deserted house" (261). You can see the devoted officers, leaving their wagons piled high with empty pine boxes to slosh into May mud and forgotten woods, to count every man and bring him home. This Republic isn't candy-colored fun by any means, but it isn't depressing, either; like some funerals, it both mourns and celebrates. An informative read with bracing illustrations, good for all levels of grounding in the topic. Straight A.

My friend and I watched this movie a few years ago and I've been thinking about it for some reason and I can't come up with the name and it's driving me crazy.

We watched it in probably 2003 or 2004 on DVD, and it didn't feel much older than that, so I would estimate it came out in the late '90s or early aughts. It had a very talky feel to it, like it might have been an play first. Pretty sure it was a small indie-type film. Almost the whole film is set at one table in a restaurant. It starts out with two guys at the restaurant chit-chatting, catching up on life. One of the guys had reddish curly hair and always had some kind of smile on his face, like he was perpetually in joke-telling mode. (I want to say that one of these guys might have actually penned the script, too?)

One of the guys (I forget which one) starts talking about his involvement with a married woman (foreshadowing!). At some point a married couple comes in. I want to say that the married couple appeared to know only one of the guys, but either way, they join them at their table. There's a lot more talking and stuff, and then at some point it comes out that this is the married woman the guy's having the affair with (and maybe the other original guy was shocked, because they acted like they didn't know each other?). I think the very last scene was the only one that wasn't in the restaurant, it was outside, and it was a fight scene (not fist-fighting, just yelling), where maybe the woman got dumped by both of the guys?

My friend and I spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff (and she is excellent with the Google-fu), and came up with nothing. The title might have had "dinner" in it? Or maybe that's too obvious. One of my searches came up with Dinner with Friends and I was like "that's it!", but it totally wasn't.

One last thing, I didn't recognize anyone in the movie at the time. They might be famous now, but at the time, at least, they weren't very well-known (though they could have been huge on the off-Broadway or indie-film circuit, for all I know).

Thanks!

Help me Obi Wan Tomato, you're my only hope

*****

I saw this black and white movie back in the 1980s.

It was in French, although I can't remember if there were subtitles or not (I grew up in Belgium — it was showing on some channel that a bunch of school friends and I were watching in lieu of doing homework).

• It was about aliens.
• The aliens looked exactly like humans (cheap costume budget?).
• The only way to tell an alien from a human was to hit it on the head, causing a metallic musical note to sound.
• I kind of think that the aliens could somehow "infect" the humans and turn them into aliens, but I wouldn't swear to it.
• At the end of the movie, the heros have vanquished the aliens and for some reason knock their own head, causing a metallic musical note. It fades to black with them all bonking themselves on the head with their fists and hearing the musical note.

Google tells me there are a LOT of movies about aliens…

Thanks,
Mary

We'll talk books, boys, crappy guests, and whatever else is on your mind. Chat window below!

The chat begins at 1 PM ET; join us live, or watch later and say your piece in the comments!

(Submitting a question today? Excellent. I may edit it for brevity/clarity. You can also submit answers; all comments are moderated. It may get bumpy technically, but hang in there. As usual, if your question is published, you're eligible for Tomato Nation merch. Have fun!)

I've just remembered a book that I loved as a kid, and now I'm gripped by the urge to track it down — but I can't remember what it was called.  

It was set in New York and was about a group of kids who were reluctant readers. One day they find a thesaurus that has been accidentally put on the shelf of books that they're officially allowed to read. The teacher tries to take it off them, but they steal it and hide it. 

Throughout the rest of the book they take it in turns to use the thesaurus to change things about their lives; for example, one girl writes an impassioned plea for a puppy. 

I was a child of the 1980s, so I reckon that this was published in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Any help in tracking it down would be greatly appreciated! My Googling skills haven't found it for me so far…

Many thanks,
Not A Reluctant Reader

I own a charming cottage timeshare in Sedona, but I made a mistake choosing to buy it.

Going to the timeshare presentation in the first place was probably a bad idea — I’m kind of a sucker. I’m not dumb; I don’t fall for check or internet scams, but a good salesman who has (paid for) my attention for 90 minutes could probably convince me of anything.

Now that it's been a year, I’ve realized it’s not worth the money to me. I paid about 10K for a week every other year. The resort offered me less than 2K to buy it back. If I’d paid cash, I might have just cut my losses. But I still owe 8K on a 13% loan.

First, can I sell it? I contacted two realtors, but neither of them had a clue. I'd like to know if there's "a place" or "a person" that specializes in selling timeshares, and of course whether I can get anywhere near what I owe for it.

I’m not usually this terrible with money (I got caught up in the moment!), so it pains me to think about the loan terms. I want to get rid of this debt badly, but I know opening an assortment of 0% credit cards to pay it off is probably a dumb move. I am wondering whether refinancing my house to cover this loan makes any sense. I owe probably 15-20% under the value of my home. Even though I bought my house in 2009, mortgage rates are quite a bit more favorable than the 15-year 4.5% one I have.

At the end of the day, I just want to know how to best minimize what I pay for this thing. What are my options?

Signed,
Staying away from extended sales pitches

Dear Stay,

I would get a real-estate attorney. Explain the situation as you understand it, turn over all the relevant paperwork, decide what's more important to you — getting what you owe, or getting out of it — and advise her to formulate a plan based on that goal. I've never considered a timeshare of this type, primarily because I've heard so many horror stories about people overestimating the time they'd spend there and how trying to get out of the damn thing turned into a part-time job. Prepare to spend a little more money so that someone else with realty/contract experience can represent you.

If it's more important to you to get full value, see if you can't make some money back with a sublet of some sort — nothing illegal or sketchy, just letting friends use the timeshare and giving you some money if possible. But I would set my sights on dumping it, honestly. Take the resort's offer, and focus on paying down the loan, which should be a regular reminder for a while that owning property you don't live in is…for rich people.

Yes, you should probably look into refinancing your house anyway, but as far as the timeshare, hire someone to translate the situation for you and/or get you out of it.

And you made it exciting! With just minutes to spare, you raised those last bucks to get to 50K. This is no surprise to me, mind you — but as usual, I'm very proud of you.

The final tallies: $50,450 donated; 31,802 students reached; and 267 projects completed.

Well done; thank you. And you know what that means: prizing and prom!

I'll take care of prizing in the next couple of days; if you're not sure you're entered, check your email — if you got a form response from me, you're all set. If you didn't, just re-forward your receipt to bunting at tomatonation dot com by 5 PM ET. Worst case, I already got it, no big deal. Please also set your filters so emails from that address get through. Yes, overseas entries are eligible; yes, you can still win a "main" prize if you won a daily.

Prom is TBD, but it will likely take place in the fall ("Tom-ecoming"? Anyone?) and it will definitely involve pinning cheap satin to the tomato suit. I hope y'all can come.

While you're waiting for me to pull that together, go read some of the thank-you notes from teachers. Warm the old heart, they do.

When a blog and its readers really love each other…

…nearly 36K on the morning of our last day, with almost twenty-five thousand students helped and 223 projects completed. Amazing work. I'm all tingly! In a rated-G way, of course. Keep going!

It's the last day of Goin' All The Way. Let's do just that. Let's polish off a library project (just $14!). Let's buy a tablet for a civil-rights unit before it expires (just 6 days left!). Let's help a "living systems" class in Arkansas, or curb teen pregnancy in Tulsa.

Let's get to 50K today.

Today's prize is a complete set of Degrassi Junior High on DVD, in honor of a certain young lady's "all the way with Stephanie Kaye" election platform. I hope it inspires you as it has inspired this band:

Donate to any project on the Prom Page; forward me your receipts to bunting at tomatonation dot com. Tell friends, family, and Facebook peeps that even $1 can help, that a tomato costume does not just drape itself in cheap satin. And be proud. You've helped so many communities and ended the school year on a high note for so many classrooms.

Almost done! Let's go all the way.

Before we get to the cheating and the speed quarters and the sitting around in Umbro shorts psychoanalyzing the Romance-languages department: over thirty grand raised! Nearly 23,000 kids helped! TWO HUNDRED AND SIX projects completed, one for every bone in Fred the skeleton's body! (Remember him? Yeah. You funded him. Bony high five!)

Today it's all about two things: 1) the PROM match code (enter it at checkout until midnight Hawaii time; get your donation matched up to $500!) and 2) post-prom dramarama. Pennsylvania needs to keep it safe after the prom; Cali needs to learn about the hazards of underage drinking; Houston just wants to keep dancing; and these Tarheels want to follow up on the success of their prom-safety video from last year.

Donate to one of these, or any other project on the TN Prom Giving Page; forward those receipts to bunting at tomatonation dot com; and you could win a $25 Amazon gift card (thanks, Kate G.!), or a $25 sponsorship for RightRides.org.

Twenty grand-ish left with two days to go. You can do it, Nation; today can make it easier. If you haven't tweeted or FB'd the TN Prom, today's the day; don't forget that PROM match code. See what you can win (or what I'm rambling on about), then go donate!