Summer Reading:

Love in the Time of Cholera,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(Love, love, loving this book. The description of the marital argument makes me thrum with recognition. It's a welcome break from Hardy protagonists who suffer in silence, and mainstream protagonists who don't, you know, think.)

The Sparrow,
Mary Doria Russell

(re-reading, because Tony just gave it back to me. Leant it to Dirk last night; heaven knows when I'll see it again.)

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency,
Douglas Adams

(re-reading, just because.)

june 20, 2003.

I had been looking forward to today as the unofficial beginning of the summer, a day when I could begin to establish the ground work for the summer of slack that shimmers before me. Instead I was worked like a dog. Okay, a dog that didn't have to teach and who was allowed to go at 2:30 (the second last person in the department!), but a dog nonetheless. The end of year paperwork is astounding. All kidding aside, I was planning to get a good head start on filing and organizing my course binders, but I was consumed by minutia until I left with a pounding headache. It's just not a good idea to spend 6 hours in a windowless, airless concrete bunker in the beginning of summer. Just see if your head doesn't pound then.

No new developments on the Sprout front today. I'm going out dancing with Dirk tonight, so I'm hoping for a repeat of Monday's Industrial baby acrobatics. I think I'm going to the right place. The one where nobody remembers my name...

later

No dancing and no baby aerobics, although we did run into Death & her boy, who chatted about the Hulk and explained the mechanism behind cryptic crosswords. It was kind of nice to be in the Garden for a few hours, drinking water and having intelligent conversation with three sober, intelligent people.

"He seems nice."
"He is nice. Worthy of Death. Hmm. That sounded weird."

Dirk & I met up an hour before at the Tequila Bookworm, where I had a vanilla milkshake and we discussed the futility of keeping track of "a moral debt" that someone owes. My point was that if you concede the existence of an objective moral code, then you must also concede the existence of a scorekeeper, who makes our judgements relatively irrelevant. I've always hated relativism because of its wishy-wahsyness, but I have to admit that the central tenet of my religion is that I have no right to be an objective judge of human behaviour other than my own.

Or, as Maude Flanders said, "Homer & Marge, we don't judge you. That's for an angry God to do."

Now I'm going to pick up Love in the Time of Cholera and read myself to sleep. I am loving this book, although it makes me vaguely embarrassed - it's like admitting you like Dickens; everybody's been to the party before you. I tried to read One Hundred Years of Solitude during the school year, but I had too many things on my mind to give it proper attention. Now that I have time, I'm wading into these books like a scurvy-ridden sailor in an orange grove. Yaaar.

Booty Call: Day 105 - Length: 13 cm crown to rump (16 cm or 6 1/4 inches head to toe). Weight: about 155 g.

4 years ago today: Life's a bitch. No, wait, I'm a bitch.