Amazon is selling the complete Penguin Classics library (1,082 titles) for a little over eight thousand dollars.
Want! Want! Want! Want! Want!
It might be worth moving to Alameda to have space for 700 pounds of story.
Golden Age
Kris: “The thing about the Arthurian legend is that it isn’t a triumphant story. It’s a tragedy. Arthur creates a golden age, but as the modern reader you already know it’s doomed to fail, because look where we’re living now.”
Gene: “Not a golden age.”
Kris: “Exactly.”
Gene: “…We have Go-gurt.”
Troll Estate
Gene and I recently went and looked at some San Francisco houses for sale. That was mighty weird. They mostly weren’t much bigger than our current apartment (except they all had full-floor garage/basements for some reason; I guess all real estate in this area comes with its own trollspace), but they were houses, y’all. Like, you know where your parents live? That kind of space! I kept asking questions like “don’t the other units have use of this yard?” And “are utilities included in the rent?” No. This is no apartment. This is a whole separate kingdom.
Unfortunately, to buy a house in San Francisco we’d have to move out to Bernal Heights or Upper Market or the Outer Sunset, and what I realized after our tour was that I’m not merely unwilling to leave San Francisco, I’m unwilling even to leave the ten-block radius of the Castro. So we’re going to look at some apartments around here.
Granted, if we give up on the city altogether and move to, say, Alameda we can own this crazy mansion of awesomeness:
But I’m not ready for so much awesome. I need to work up to that level of awesome very slowly. So, Castro it is.
Noe Street Farmer’s Market
I love the little hand-painted signs at farmer’s market stalls. All these promises and guarantees of organic healthfulness; it’s like reading the label on a bottle of fresh, delicious snake oil.
Bread handmade by beautiful French virgins!
Potatoes harvested by blind choirboys!
Eggs laid by hens fed on only the finest butter and chocolate!
Dandelion greens that were…picked from a field, but you live in the city and have no fields available to you to replicate this feat!
I admit it, I couldn’t resist. We are eating good tonight!
The Day I Shot Cupid
I have now finished reading Jennifer Love Hewitt’s book, The Day I Shot Cupid: Hello, My Name is Jennifer Love Hewitt and I’m a Love-aholic.
I do this for you, people. All for you.
I really enjoyed this book. It made me giggle several times. Honestly, I have no idea whether I’m laughing with her or at her. She is the director, producer and star of her own TV show, and I have to think that requires some brains and savvy, so it seems entirely possible that she (or her ghostwriter) is being tongue-in-cheek throughout. Either way, this thing is peppered with gems. Vagazzle gems, that is. Allow me to drop some Love knowledge on you…
How to get a guy to snuggle:
“Guys hate to spoon…So here’s the trick: Play it cool until he falls asleep and then Velcro yourself to him, quickly and with very little motion (think Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible). And then, if and when he wakes, turn quickly like you were just stretching, and wait. When the little lamb sleeps again One…Two…Three…Velcro!!!!!!!!!!!!”
I am inexpressibly sad to think that this lovely, famous woman has to trick guys into snuggling with her.
“Fat, and not with a PH”
In this brief section, Love rants for a few paragraphs about people calling her fat. But she doesn’t care! She just sips her margarita and orders some FOOD for dinner! “OH, I BET YOU LOVE THAT! FOOD. THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID FOOD!” What kind of food, Love? She doesn’t say, but she is eating it “bite by low-calorie bite.” That’ll show ’em.
“Be Polite, It’s Cellulite”
“Department stores have seen what lurks under your jeans and have invented shorts — tight, skin-colored, cut-off-the-blood-supply shorts…And now you waddle. They are so tight…’Be polite, it’s cellulite.’ Lots of women have it!…models have it. Yeah, perfect people are just like us! Let’s all have a celly parade! Walk in bikinis and invite people to bring tomatoes to throw at our cottage cheese! And the shorts from those Einsteins at the Spanx company have saved our lives…Don’t shoot the messenger, but put on those shorts and learn to waddle!”
I find it kind of endearing that she hates her cellulite-hiding, waddle-making Spanx so much that she wants every woman to wear them. I mean, on all the days except the day we have our celly parade.
Warp
Gene and I have been together so long that he’s more or less warped me for life. Now when he offers to take me out for dinner, romantic restaurants like Paul K or the Beach Chalet don’t even occur to me. Mentally I go straight to the list of Best Bay Area Sandwiches and start rubbing my little hands together in gleeful anticipation.
What the fleet?
It’s not Fleet Week, so why are there fighter jets cruising over my neighborhood? This is unsettling as hell.
Diurnal sounds
Almost six years I’ve been living here and I’ve only just noticed that the mockingbird in the garden mostly performs car alarms. Occasionally he imitates the neighbor’s yappy dog or the trolley rumbling down Market, but mostly he sticks to alarms. City birds, eh?
I don’t hear the two a.m. girls whooing in there at all, though. I’m glad to see they’re not keeping him awake.
Vajazzle
After reading this, it is hardly surprising that I would rush out to request Jennifer Love Hewitt’s book from the library. There is absurdity out there and I must consume it.
What IS surprising is that there are two people in line for this book ahead of me.
Two more weeks
I miss my man. I can’t settle down to anything; any books, I mean. This is what being thwarted in love does to me, even if I’m only being thwarted for a few weeks — my reading suffers. And I’m finding Gene all over the place. In Forster, for example: “It struck her that it was hopeless to look for chivalry in such a man. He would do her no harm by idle gossip; he was trustworthy, intelligent, and even kind; he might even have a high opinion of her. But he lacked chivalry; his thoughts, like his behavior, would not be modified by awe.”
Gene never has been in awe of me, even at fifteen, an age when one might expect a little awe of a pretty girl. I love that about him. I’ve had to supply twice the awe, of course, to make up for it, but this seems to work for us.
It does feel odd to be buying prosaic things like tablecloths for a wedding with such a man. We probably ought to go stand alone in some hidden grove very quietly for a few minutes and at the end of it we would be married. But one does have to eat, after all, and one might as well have tablecloths to keep the dirt off the food.