and where we go from here is anybody's guess
It's mighty tedious experimenting with lj styles on a dial-up connection. That's self-evident, isn't it? The problem is, I like my journal style; all those right angles make me happy inside in a way right angles probably shouldn't, and it's all clean and simple and narrow down the center of the page, as I am reclaiming the vertical on my computer monitor. I like that each entry is separated; I like that it links to my allpics page; I like that it shows the day of the week along with the date. I just get bored, so every now and then I rifle through the other styles, channel Goldilocks, and end up just messing minutely with my colors. I give the purple one day to grow on me, and then I'm changing it back or trying something new.
I've been doing so little these past few days it's barely worth recounting, but I did read Ella Minnow Pea: kinda cute and a little too clever, but at least it didn't take up too much of my time. It's the story of a tiny island nation off the Carolina coast whose claim to fame is that the man who created the sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog was a native son. A monument of the immortal pangram has stood for a hundred years or so, but letters have started falling off, which the island Council interprets as a SIGN from beyond the grave that those letters should no longer be used in speech or writing. It's an epistolary novel, so we see the islanders struggling to communicate using progressively fewer and fewer letters as the Council gets more and more fanatical. It's an interesting premise, I just felt like a lot more could have been done with it. I'm almost done with Never Let Me GoI'll give it its last forty pages to surprise me.
I woke up to rain this morning, and I woke up early, to have breakfast with my father. By "early" I mean my dad wanted to leave by ten, so I set my alarm for nine-fifteen and dragged myself into the shower at nine-forty. We ate at a diner (I think we're just taking a tour of all of them) on US-1, a diner now open 24 hours!something to remember when it's midnight and all the city is silent. My dad and I split the paper and I drank coffee and ate eggs and biscuits while I mocked the Sentinel sportswriter for stupidity and mediocrity, lamenting the lack of cable in this house, which means I'll be missing the Federer-Nadal French Open semifinal tomorrow. So it goes. Then I spread the crossword out next to me, hiding my coffee cup, so that later, when a waitress came by at the end of our meal, while we were just lingering, she was confused and apologetic, having not refilled me earlier. I said it was okayif I'd wanted more coffee and she hadn't seen my cup, I would have asked for some. She made some jokey comment about my not looking old enough to even drink coffee, and when asked, said first that I looked to be in my "early teens," then revised to seventeen. Ha! If I'd had my hair in ponytail buns like I've been wearing it occasionally I probably could have passed for twelve.
My dad said he essentially owned me until threethe time I'd normally be just getting up. Which was slightly unfair, really; by three I've usually at least had breakfast. The skies opened up on the way out of the restaurant and kept opening wider and wider as we drove down Stirling and into the Barnes & Noble parking lot. It was raining so hard that I waited to dart out of the car and into the store, even though we'd pulled up right to the overhang. We spent an hour or two browsing. I was poking through the essay section looking for likely library material when a woman down the aisle near the children's section started hitting her child. She pushed her, and kicked her when she fell down, and a man who'd come up behind me said "if I see her do that again I'm calling the police. Did she just kick her?" and I nodded at him silently, wide-eyed, probably looking even younger than the waitresses had thought. They left though, the child and the mother and another woman who might have been the mother's mother, the child wailing through the store. I don't know where the man went.
I almost got The Best American Nonrequired Reading (edited by David Eggers and Viggo Mortensen), but in the end came away with only The New Lifetime Reading Plan. It's patronizing and necessarily limited and focused quite a lot on dead white European males; this "new" edition boasts the inclusion of "literatures of the whole world", an admirable goal, but it comes with this baffling passage from the preface: "The inclusion in this edition of such works as the Koranthe fundamental scripture of Islamand the Zen scripture The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch raises the question of why the Bible is not listed here as well. The reason is simple. We assume that nearly every reader of this book will own a Bible and be at least somewhat accustomed to reading it; and there is nothing we might try to say about it that would not seem presumptuous." I thought that was quite an assumption to be making about their readership. But perhaps that's just me! Well, me and my mother, who looked incredulous when I read it out to her. But I recognized just about every author they included so I figured they'll make a good starting point. The editors talk earnestly about quotidian drudgery leaving one mentally unsatisfied and the enlargement of the mind that will result from Great Conversations with these great minds. It's a little irritating, but I know there's quite a lot to be said for digging into the primary texts. I'll break up my reading schedule with Nietzsche or Montaigne or The History of the Peloponnesian War, trading off as I've been doing: math for crime, history for autobiography, novels for science, something heavy for something light. I have all the textbooks I've never read. I have nothing but time.
We saw Madagascar after we'd made off with our books (and after we'd sat in on the end of The Longest Yard, since we were half an hour early for our showing) which was, you know, cute. I had to keep reminding myself to shut up and enjoy the anthropomorphism. Obviously I haven't been getting out enough. My mom called my cell phone just as my dad and I were driving by her school; he dropped me off, and my mom and I paid a visit to my grandmother, who was very chipper and relatively lucid today. It comes and goes, but today was a good day.
I need desperately to get to a gym. Forget the loss of muscle tone and the jeans that are too tight in the thigh, I'd like to get my metabolism and energy up again, I'd like to not be stiff and slightly achy when I wake up in the afternoon. I miss swinging my body through its whole range of motion, and I just won't do it on my own. I've been helping my mother get a routine started, and I do a little weights and stretching at the same time, but my body is not impressed. I want to get to the Y this week (not today, though today was a good today, and not tomorrow because I'm meeting S. for lunch and GRE studying), and then sometime next week malelia_honu and I should be able to work out together for a little while, just to get me started with a fucking routine. I'd go jogging, but it's South Florida out there and the humidity has come. Plus I hate jogging. I take it all back.
I've been doing so little these past few days it's barely worth recounting, but I did read Ella Minnow Pea: kinda cute and a little too clever, but at least it didn't take up too much of my time. It's the story of a tiny island nation off the Carolina coast whose claim to fame is that the man who created the sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog was a native son. A monument of the immortal pangram has stood for a hundred years or so, but letters have started falling off, which the island Council interprets as a SIGN from beyond the grave that those letters should no longer be used in speech or writing. It's an epistolary novel, so we see the islanders struggling to communicate using progressively fewer and fewer letters as the Council gets more and more fanatical. It's an interesting premise, I just felt like a lot more could have been done with it. I'm almost done with Never Let Me GoI'll give it its last forty pages to surprise me.
I woke up to rain this morning, and I woke up early, to have breakfast with my father. By "early" I mean my dad wanted to leave by ten, so I set my alarm for nine-fifteen and dragged myself into the shower at nine-forty. We ate at a diner (I think we're just taking a tour of all of them) on US-1, a diner now open 24 hours!something to remember when it's midnight and all the city is silent. My dad and I split the paper and I drank coffee and ate eggs and biscuits while I mocked the Sentinel sportswriter for stupidity and mediocrity, lamenting the lack of cable in this house, which means I'll be missing the Federer-Nadal French Open semifinal tomorrow. So it goes. Then I spread the crossword out next to me, hiding my coffee cup, so that later, when a waitress came by at the end of our meal, while we were just lingering, she was confused and apologetic, having not refilled me earlier. I said it was okayif I'd wanted more coffee and she hadn't seen my cup, I would have asked for some. She made some jokey comment about my not looking old enough to even drink coffee, and when asked, said first that I looked to be in my "early teens," then revised to seventeen. Ha! If I'd had my hair in ponytail buns like I've been wearing it occasionally I probably could have passed for twelve.
My dad said he essentially owned me until threethe time I'd normally be just getting up. Which was slightly unfair, really; by three I've usually at least had breakfast. The skies opened up on the way out of the restaurant and kept opening wider and wider as we drove down Stirling and into the Barnes & Noble parking lot. It was raining so hard that I waited to dart out of the car and into the store, even though we'd pulled up right to the overhang. We spent an hour or two browsing. I was poking through the essay section looking for likely library material when a woman down the aisle near the children's section started hitting her child. She pushed her, and kicked her when she fell down, and a man who'd come up behind me said "if I see her do that again I'm calling the police. Did she just kick her?" and I nodded at him silently, wide-eyed, probably looking even younger than the waitresses had thought. They left though, the child and the mother and another woman who might have been the mother's mother, the child wailing through the store. I don't know where the man went.
I almost got The Best American Nonrequired Reading (edited by David Eggers and Viggo Mortensen), but in the end came away with only The New Lifetime Reading Plan. It's patronizing and necessarily limited and focused quite a lot on dead white European males; this "new" edition boasts the inclusion of "literatures of the whole world", an admirable goal, but it comes with this baffling passage from the preface: "The inclusion in this edition of such works as the Koranthe fundamental scripture of Islamand the Zen scripture The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch raises the question of why the Bible is not listed here as well. The reason is simple. We assume that nearly every reader of this book will own a Bible and be at least somewhat accustomed to reading it; and there is nothing we might try to say about it that would not seem presumptuous." I thought that was quite an assumption to be making about their readership. But perhaps that's just me! Well, me and my mother, who looked incredulous when I read it out to her. But I recognized just about every author they included so I figured they'll make a good starting point. The editors talk earnestly about quotidian drudgery leaving one mentally unsatisfied and the enlargement of the mind that will result from Great Conversations with these great minds. It's a little irritating, but I know there's quite a lot to be said for digging into the primary texts. I'll break up my reading schedule with Nietzsche or Montaigne or The History of the Peloponnesian War, trading off as I've been doing: math for crime, history for autobiography, novels for science, something heavy for something light. I have all the textbooks I've never read. I have nothing but time.
We saw Madagascar after we'd made off with our books (and after we'd sat in on the end of The Longest Yard, since we were half an hour early for our showing) which was, you know, cute. I had to keep reminding myself to shut up and enjoy the anthropomorphism. Obviously I haven't been getting out enough. My mom called my cell phone just as my dad and I were driving by her school; he dropped me off, and my mom and I paid a visit to my grandmother, who was very chipper and relatively lucid today. It comes and goes, but today was a good day.
I need desperately to get to a gym. Forget the loss of muscle tone and the jeans that are too tight in the thigh, I'd like to get my metabolism and energy up again, I'd like to not be stiff and slightly achy when I wake up in the afternoon. I miss swinging my body through its whole range of motion, and I just won't do it on my own. I've been helping my mother get a routine started, and I do a little weights and stretching at the same time, but my body is not impressed. I want to get to the Y this week (not today, though today was a good today, and not tomorrow because I'm meeting S. for lunch and GRE studying), and then sometime next week malelia_honu and I should be able to work out together for a little while, just to get me started with a fucking routine. I'd go jogging, but it's South Florida out there and the humidity has come. Plus I hate jogging. I take it all back.