October 17, 1999.

Another weekend goes by, 9 hours of it spent sitting at someone else's desk and waiting for something to happen. When the phone does ring, the problem is usually out of my jurisdiction...and so the buck is passed. All good procedure. I haven't had to go into the computer system & fix anything for more than a month. But what's really ironic is that I need to get in touch with a higher-up right now...and I can't reach anyone's cell phone. So that something I can fix will go unfixed until I receive the authority to fix it, that is, as soon as one of these guys turns on their goddamn cell phone. Sheesh.

(I think lack of weekend down time is making me a little loopy, so do with that little rant what you will.)

In other news, I finished Infinite Jest today. Let me point out at this time that I never really wanted to read the damn thing, and the reason I did is entirely due to my own obnoxiousness. See, the Boy thinks that David Foster Wallace hung the moon (that is, he did until he recently started reading Philip K. Dick & found one of the authors Wallace rips off.) My exposure to Wallace pre-Boy was nil, so last year I borrowed The Broom of the System, which more or less completely infuriated me. I'm not a post-modernist by any means, and I have no real liking for an author who disrespects Story to the extent that he'll write something compelling & refuse to give it an ending. Should we reward such a man with critical acclaim & money?

Upon completion of Broom, I began a rather elongated argument with the Boy about the relative merits of DFW. It is not a good thing to insist to your SO that you consider his favourite author (a man he ardently wishes to emulate in his own creative efforts) as nothing more than a snake-oil salesman. I think this kind of structuralism is a gimmick, and it offends me on a very deep & hard-to-express level. Maybe I'm just old fashioned & declassé, but I like Story. I like things with development, crisis and above all, narrative point. When I would express these opinions, things often got ugly. I would pick on DFW for no good reason, dragging him into a conversation just to insult him. I'll admit it - I was a jerk about the whole thing. So to make amends, I took it upon myself to buy Infinite Jest, DFW's 1000-page opus, which lives on many undergraduates' shelves but is seldom read.

It was difficult. Really difficult. For the most part, I had to be in a place absolutely devoid of other stimuli...which meant lunch hour at the mailroom. I pegged away at the fucking thing day after day, growing more interested despite myself. You can do a lot with a couple hundred pages, and make no mistake, it's a complex story. Sometimes I'd talk to the Boy about my impressions. Usually this meant expressing a desire to launch DFW from the tip of my boot for trying to be so fucking clever all the time.

(I mean, he inserted 388 footnotes into the text, some of which are 8 pages long. Footnotes. Who footnotes their own novel for Christ's sake?)

I actually became emotionally involved at some point. I'm not sure when, but there was a cross-over point where I started to care about what happened to Hal & Mario & Don & Madame Psychosis. Would the Quebec Separatist Wheelchair Assassins find the ultimate entertainment before the somewhat-less sinister forces of O.N.A.N.? What really was behind the veil of the PGOAT (prettiest girl of all time)? How many times could 17 go into 56? And at the same time, I kicked myself for caring. Because I just knew DFW was going to burn me.

And now it's over. And of course, I got burned. There was absolutely zero resolution. There was no explanation of the beginning, which seems to occur a significant amount of time after the book ends. It was really not a satisfying experience. But it's done. It's done. It's done. Samuel Richardson tried to bring me down with 1500 pages of Clarissa, but he couldn't break me. 388 footnotes didn't break me. I am the queen of needlessly long novels. Yeah.

"'You have a calling, a talent. A missleman of your caliber. Reach down & rally, me little button.'

"Possalthwaite had taken his face from his hands and was staring somewhere stonily past Pemulis, lips moving in the habitual sucking reflex for which he took so much guff. His face had the pink scrubbed look of a crying child all right. His hands had left brown spider of tincture of benzoin on his cheeks. He had two little smudges of bruise under the eyes. He sniffed meatily through a nose still covered in horizontal strips of surgical tape. 'I ab dot a little button.'

"'That's what all the little buttons say, kid.'"

I've dreamt of being a vampire all this week. In the most interesting episode I can recall, I hijacked an ice cream truck & repeatedly kissed the pretty female driver. I think it's a sign.

Then again, last week I dreamt incessantly of David Bowie, and he's nowhere to be seen. Sigh.