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12.24.4
happy holidays
Today was a rough day at work, but at least I got a bunch of books out of the library before it closed for the long weekend.Recent recap:
Have been playing: Fredrick Pohl's Gateway II (just finished Gateway), Katamari Damashi
Recently read: Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (95% - it just really pissed me off and I couldn't finish it), Cruddy by Linda Barry (loved it)
(Here is the difference between me and an actual blogger: I'll spend all this time looking up my friends' friends on Friendster but I can't be bothered to hyperlink my consumerist choices. Sorry)
A. is annoyed with me for taking a bunch of questionnaires on social class, like the Living Room Scale which purports to measure your social class based on your living room decor - prompted by the website for the PBS program on social class in America, People Like Us. For what it's worth, we score solidly in the middle class - A.'s upper-class overflowing bookshelves and Latin-bearing Belly of an Architect poster neutralized by my family photos and silk flowers.
Last weekend, on the way from the noisy cafeteria-style Thai restaurant Republic to get pastries at 71 Irving, we passed an ambulance with its doors open. A couple paramedics came from around the back and wheeled a body on a stretcher into it, and I caught a glimpse of this season's closed, pointed toes, in black, peeking out from under the sheet that covered the body. It felt like a lesson in something, but I'm still not sure what - the things New York is trying to teach me seem to get drowned out by the chaos of the city itself.
I will guess that Wind-up Bird is disfavor'd because of the way women are portrayed in the story and in the writing.