I should be a more faithful blogger, so in an effort to return to my previous state of posting a few times a week rather than a few times a month, I will write more casually about daily events. Some of my blogging lethargy was a resistance to writing book reviews, which feels a bit like schoolwork. Nevertheless, I still expect books to feature heavily on my blog, because, well, books are what I do.
1. Complaints. I shall start off with a complaint about canceled classes. While I, like any other student, pray to the god of the clock to be let out of class early, some part of me resents the wasted time and especially the wasted money. No more evident was that than today, when a class that I assist, and for which I come to campus expressly on Wednesdays, was canceled without explanation. I cooled my temper by reminding myself that I get paid the same whether I sit through the professor’s lecture or not, but if I’d known about the cancellation, I wouldn’t have even left the house.
2. Books. I am turning into a multiple-book reader. Previously, in those glorious undergraduate days, when I had all the time I could ever want, I would read one book at a time, cover to cover, one after another. Now I read in snatches, and several books at a time. Right now I’m muddling through a biography of Katherine Mansfield and a 900-page mammoth by M.M. Kaye called The Far Pavilions. I started it three days ago and haven’t even made it a third of the way through.
3. Tea. I’m a bit sad that whatever the Texan equivalent of winter is, is departing. I’d been drinking two or three cups of tea a day, and now that it’s getting much warmer, I don’t always feel like sitting down with a steaming cup. I remember vaguely a snippet from Andre Dubus III’s novel The House of Sand and Fog, which I read furtively in a bookstore, about how drinking hot drinks year-round helps you regulate your body temperature better, or something along those lines. To me, though, the loss of afternoon tea is also the loss of the cookies or chocolates to accompany the PG Tips or Earl Grey. Sugar and spice and everything nice.
4. Capricious Washing Machine. My washing machine is broken. Sometimes. Half the time, the basin doesn’t fill up initially; half the time, it doesn’t advance through the cycles properly; and the other half of the time (Can you count? I can’t.), it will work with no problems. The broken times have apparently no logic or pattern to them. Today it worked, tomorrow it may not. But then again it might. If not for these domestic imponderables, I fear my life would have no meaning.
Mostly About Books 