Life Listed - Chronologically

I am working on reading my books. Sometimes, I do the math in my head and think that I can finish my goal of reading all the Pultizer Prize winning novels in like 2 years. Then I calm myself down and realize I just just give myself the time I need, not try to come up with unreasonable expectations. I completed the two books I bought, Gilead and The Known World. Both were good, as they should be given the won an award and all. And award worth only $3,000. But an award none the less. Now I'm reading Philip Roth's American Pastoral which is a compelling read but kind of cliched in a certain degree. I felt the same way about Empire Falls, an Pulizer Prize winner I read before I started my challenge. Reading is dorky fun.

I am thinking about illusive, wandering things. I have been thinking about how now that all the demons are gone, to what degree are the allowed to haunt me.

My grandmother is being cared for in an old age home while my parents are on vacation. Her alzheimers is progressing quickly and she needs a great deal of supervision and assitance. Sometimes, I think this is a great excuse I make for not wanting to, not being able to, care for her. I went to visit her on her seond day there. She was sitting on the couch, because she was the only person who wasn't sitting in a wheel chair. Everyone in the locked wing has alzheimers, and they were sitting around the television watching a sing along. Some old broad with blue hair was encouraging them to sing He's a Jolly Good Fellow. I guess it's good for them. It was a nice place, but it was depressing. To see these old people singing with the television, to think that is what life comes to. All this, and you watch sing alongs. All this, and they keep you in a locked wing to prevent you from wandering into traffic. I haven't dealt with a lot of old people in my life. I'm not used to these environments. I'm not used to thinking about being old. Thinking about being 30 is tough enough.
Tuesday, May 9, 2006

I have been thinking about both sides of the argument, and where the truth lies. When do you get to be the know-it-all that is a pain-in-the-ass to the boss? When are you the creative team member who is full of valuable and wonderful ideas? When are you a quiet non-contributor? When are you smart enough to keep your mouth shut? Is there a difference in intention on either side in these situations? Where do you draw the line?

I am finding it very difficult to find shoes that are both attractive and functional in the state of New Jersey. I am not sure if shoes no longer serve this dual pupose, but I suspect that there are more of such shoes available in Manhattan as people there actually use their feet.

I pretended to be sick yesterday. And they believed me! I got genuine "how are you feeling"s from senior management as my voice message was decidely congested. Note: call in sick when you have just woken up, finished screaming at your bird to be quiet for 10 seconds so you can call in sick, and haven't as much as cleared your throat. Especially when you are a mouth sleeper who is "suffering" from seasonal allergies that generally makes me sound this way anyhow. Then you can call in sick even though the only "medicine" you had was a shopping trip to try to find above described shoes but wind up with some clearance rack buys.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006

I am wondering if my obsession / interest in research is bullshit. I am wondering this based on looking at the word research too much by typing it into too many job search engines. I wonder if research really is just re-search and its a search that's already been done, somewhere, and my searching is a fruitless replication on what has already been done. I like to also think that there are old fashioned engine, coal or steamed powered behind these supposed job search engines.

I have an allergy in my right eye. Just the right one mind you. The left one is wondering what is going on, trying just to do the job and look, see, and view. The right one wants to water, itch, make my right nostril run. I spent $100 dollars at an opthamologist's office this afternoon instead of working to find this out as I was convinced I must have have the sharpest shard of glass slowly disintergrating my cornea that was logged in my lower eyelid. Instead, I have a bullshit diagnosis.
Friday, April 7, 2006

I won the college basketball pool. This makes me proud. This makes me, in some small way, a winner. I am better than 31 other people at randomly picking the best amount of winners and losers out of a field of 64 teams. However, self-doubt has creeped it's way into here when I realize, if I can win, how tough, really, was the competition?

I have yet to collect my winnings as the pool administrator is bullshit. He probably spent all the money handed over to him as an entry fee, since he's a little punk who lives with mom and dad, with no true understanding that not handing over winning can get your knee caps smashed. I have told him precisely this. That and I will not accept a personal check without a driver's license number and validating the signature with a major credit card. He laughed, as if such things could be taken as a joke.

Calling people, things, events bullshit is definitely not bullshit. It's my new favorite thing to boil down the entire list of reasons and explainations regardings my negative feelings about things to just calling them bullshit. The mechanic is bullshit. Trying to get me to work on Saturdays is bullshit. This day is just bullshit. This entry, bullshit.
Tuesday, April 4, 2006

I began my Pulitzer Prize book reading, even though I did not finish my last book because it would never end. No matter how much I read, there was still more to read. So I moved on to my first book "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson. Reading the reviews on amazon were a bit mixed, so I was interested in getting to read it myself. The narrative structure is original, a letter of a elderly man to his young son. I have been enjoying it. And instead of just leaving the corners of pages turned with interesting things that I have turned over in my head several times, I decided to put them here.

I have always liked the phrase "nursing a grudge," because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.

In every important way we are such secret from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aethetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any numbers of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemables among us to be actual likeness, because those aroung us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

Taken together, it makes me wonder if the reasons why, sometimes, our grudges we so carefully tend to and hold dear may be because it allows us to be more of ourselves, in a way to tend to and protect that civilization in ourselves. To not do such, we are allowing that part of us that is wholly separate and unique to suffer a small blow, to give up some of it for the sake of another. I don't think this is either a good or bad thing, it's just something that is.
Monday, April 3, 2006