Mindy Kaling (who writes for and plays Kelly on The Office) co-authors a blog called Things I’ve Bought That I Love which I’ve been really enjoying. As the title suggests, this is an unapologetic paean to consumerist pleasures and I have seized it like a life raft as I float about in the non-consumerist sea of life with Gene.

Plus, I got a couple of gift certificate/shopping spree gifts for my birthday (thanks Christine and Michele!) so I am rolling in potential buying power like a Playboy bunny on a mink rug.

(None of this accounts for today’s similes, of course. Maybe this is a function of being 28.)

What fascinates me most about her blog, apart from her far-out talent at writing intelligent sentences that still retain a giggling overtone, is that most of the entries have zero comments on them. I don’t understand how an interesting famous person has a blog that no one comments on. It makes me want to go comment on every single entry until I’ve shamed her into being my friend and letting me stay at her house when I come to LA.

She even makes me interested in her fashion posts, even though fashion kind of bores me stupid. Most fashionable clothes these days seem to me so unattractive, unflattering and boring-colored that I frankly would rather go naked than wear them, and not just because I am kind of a nudist by preference.

Sometimes I worry that when I’m old I’ll regret not having dressed this reasonably excellent body, this gift basket from God, in the latest whatevers to maximize my attractibility. But then I think, when I’m old I’ll probably be grateful that I spent my time thinking about sci-fi novels instead of worrying about when I should switch from body glitter to body shimmer. Sparkle fashion is fleeting, ladies, but space ships are forever.

I just finished The Corrections, which I picked up for $1 at the booksale per Sean’s endorsement, even though after reading the dust jacket I felt pretty confident the whole thing would just be way more reality than I wanted to deal with and would consequently depress me.

Fortunately, no. The multitude of problems encountered by the characters, though mostly realistic, are set in a Foster-Wallian framework of fantastical scientific breakthroughs (a chemical process to change your personality, a drug to eradicate shame, plus a kind of lurking-in-the-background implied corporate conspiracy) which make the dementia and breast fixations and Lithuanian currency crashes easier to deal with, emotionally.

Franzen’s great strength, apart from writing complex sentences that are easy to follow, is his characterizations. I sympathized with everyone, even though everyone behaved horribly, because their internal monologues make sense of their behavior. It confirmed my secret Pollyanna belief that everyone in the world is basically wonderful if you could just get inside their heads to see it.

Read The Corrections if you liked Infinite Jest but felt like David Foster Wallace was maybe laughing at you a little for reading it.

And a side-plug: from this experiment I have learned to trust Sean’s opinion, which I was pretty confident about anyway. Trust Sean if you like things that are good, things that are funny, or things that are Irish.