White Noise
Don Delillo

“In a rooming house. I’m totally captivated and intrigued. It’s a gorgeous old crumbling house near the insane asylum. Seven or eight boarders, more or less permanent except for me. A woman who harbors a terrible secret. A man with a haunted look. A man who never comes out of his room. A woman who stands by the letter box ( Read more... )

Snow unwalked through, hair unstraight, hands unfelt, isolated strangers friendlier as they got closer. “Do you have a cigarette?” “No, but smile for us...for the camera.” He was lowering his hand as I caught the picture, in which he wasn’t waving. By the time we continued walking and stopped staring up and ahead, hoarding snowflakes on the tips ( Read more... )

The weekend began promisingly enough. We stopped at the supermarket on our way to the Poconos to pick up the essentials. At the checkout line, while everyone else was behind us or still roaming the vast wilderness of the Stop & Shop, Lana and I presented the cashier with our items: a gallon of Smirnoff and 3 small containers of baby food. Lana ( Read more... )

-Time flies when you’re having fun. And when you’re writing a paper. Maybe it’s the same thing. Decide to skim the reading before writing, and 3 hours pass. Make notes, check the time, it’s 4am. But wait outside in the rain, in December, for the taping of a show you don’t watch, and we’re wetter than the sidewalk while it’s still 5:14am. The sole ( Read more... )

My laptop has been going crazy. “Going crazy” is the most technical term I am willing to apply to its chaotic and inconsiderate freezing, wind-up noises, and whatever else. (“Whatever else” is another technical term, “wind-up noises” is a toss-up). I’ve decided to leave it off for now, until I get a new fan or come up with another solution to ( Read more... )

-Unexpected snow. Unexpectedly cold weather. After the snow, maybe it should have been expected. I thought we might skip the season this time around, given the several warm November weeks ( Read more... )

The psych lecture I attended in the early evening focused on whether a nonverbal and preverbal concept of number exists in infants and animals, and it aimed to distinguish between human-specific factors and those which are fundamental and applicable to other species. One experiment sought to answer this question by testing whether rhesus monkeys ( Read more... )

"A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it..."

Gertrude Stein

There is a little alcove from which you can enter Christie’s room, enter my room, or if you intended neither of those, feel stupid for circling in a tiny square area and exit. It’s been extremely underused lately...lately for the alcove, always for us. Aside from temporarily and occassionally housing discrete bags of trash that we were eager to ( Read more... )

I got into the shower, after letting the water warm up for however long my roommate said worked for her. Once there, it took an additional 12 minutes…or any other precise-sounding approximation of the amount of time one must spend in cold water before preferences shift away from an indoor shower, and toward lathering up in the rain. Or no rain, ( Read more... )