My Day with Alexander

I didn’t realize my day was so bad until I called Mom and told her about it. She laughed and told me I should write a book about my day. “It could beat Alexander,” she said.

It’s true. In the last picture of this book Alexander ends up hugging someone he loves. Sunshine, crayons, and a blanket are all present.

My day ended with me throwing up. No hugging. No sunshine. No crayons.

I won. Or lost. Either way I plan on ditching Alexander tomorrow.

The Old Woman and the Gym

My journal entry from a few weeks ago went something like this:

Tonight I went with some friends to the Peking Acrobats. Amidst all the amazing (and audience-stress inducing) talent all I could think of was a conversation between myself and the old woman who issues required clothing at the gym. It went something like this:

Me: Can I get a size X swimming suit please?
OW (in thick Russian accent): I don’t think you know what size you are. Do you know what size you are?
Me: Oh. Uh. Yes?
OW: I don’t think you do. Size X is for the little Asian girls. Girls like this (holding up hands about three inches apart). You are like this (hands a bit further apart).
Me: ……
OW: Here is size Y.

It was too big.

Bleh

Our water heater is broken.

So is our heater.

It's hard to recover from a day that starts with a cold shower, an apartment that is 65 degrees, and an outside tempeture of 4.

Dynamic Reading

Robert Duvall as Boo Radley

I remember reading it for the first time while lying on the porch swing. I don't know if the image of light, filtered by the canopy of the swing, on the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird is real or imagined, but I do know that I loved the hours spent reading it. I remember closing the book and just laying there thinking. More importantly I remember I was changed by it. It was one of those changes I didn't know how to talk about. Like the character Jem, I turned inward with my thoughts, knowing I was different, but not knowing how, not knowing what to do with my new knowledge, my new self.

I just finished it for the fourth time. The circumstances around my completion were hardly so picturesque. I was on my bed, my desk was cluttered, a pair of dirty jeans on the floor. But closing the book caused the same reaction. I just laid there thinking, knowing I was once again changed.

I still don't completely know how to talk about how this book moves and changes me each time I read it, I think I will always be like Jem in that way. But it does. I think the thing I gained from it the most this time was the virtue and value of sight.

Today is Clark Gable's Birthday

Be still my heart.

Goals

I haven’t set any yet.

But I need to.

I decided to start small.

No need to rush on improvement, I tell myself.

Goal: No melted cheese for a week.

Unfortunately (and surprisingly) this has ruled out a lot of my food options.

Bookstores and Such

I was recently walking with a friend past a second-hand bookstore. I remarked to said friend how much I love not only second-hand books, but the idea of second-hand books. It brought up a seemingly insignificant memory of a small, perfectly chaotic second-hand bookshop I found in Italy. An elderly man, wearing a sweater in May, sat in the doorway reading not just a book, but books.

I found myself thinking of this elderly Italian gentlemen again when I read George Orwell’s “Bookshop Memories.” It said, “When I worked in a second-hand bookshop—so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios—the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.”

Orwell then goes on to talk about these people who seem to frequent and annoy second-hand bookstores. Those who are looking for a nameless book with a red cover. Those merely, and always only browsing. Most offensively are the consumers wanting first editions or rare treasures just for the sake of “having.” Each of these individuals is unaware that it is not their purchase that subtracts from the store; it is their presence.

For the last hour I have tried to convince myself the reason I didn’t go inside this seemingly perfect Italian second-hand bookstore was to preserve its integrity. Telling myself that only the Italian literature-lover would not accost the store. Only those who were not seeking for a treasure (like the first edition hunters) but for an experience could go inside and come away with a book and still leave the bookstore whole. Because I’m not fluent in Italian I didn’t belong, I tell myself.

Since conversation with aforementioned friend I have been kicking myself for going back to the bookstore only for a picture and not a browse and purchase of a book that would never be read, but because of the memory, always endeared.

Elitist literature readers be dammed, I should have gone in for the treasured experience.