Tuesday, September 19, 2006

catching up

Why have I been neglecting this blog so horribly? I've been asking myself this and just realized that SCHOOL STARTED since I last wrote. So there you go. In the mean time, my sister Camus visited and, boy did we enjoy some tasty homecooked gourmet-ish food: pesto, black bean tacos, and a trip to Carraba's to dip that wonderful bread in that wonderful seasoned oil over and over. We both love cooking, when it's not under duress (e.g. microwaving Spaghettios while the lads chant/whine "I'm hungry! I want gum!" in unison. Why is gum a food in their world? I don't know.) We also spent us some disposable income on some highly disposable sunglasses, headbands, and the like in a shopping "district" here called Harwin St. I could have also availed myself of many, many Paris Hiltonesque belts, bags, necklaces, and shoes, but chose to stick with the aforementioned t-shirt/jeans/flip-flops uniform for now.

Read some cool books, including Early Bird , about a youngish man who moves to Florida and retires there for about a year. Pretty insightful and enjoyable, I thought, although it does get annoying how these McSweeney's types are always the quoted ones on the back of each other's books. Oh, and the author keeps on referring to his "friend Nick" (Nick Hornby)... it gets tedious.

Speaking of name-dropping, you may want to avoid Friendship: an expose by Joseph Epstein. I have so enjoyed his essays in the past and looked forward to reading this book, but the personal anecdotes, while interesting, got to be too much. They also really exposed Epstein's snobby side... all those tedious references to his 3-year friendship with Saul Bellow. If you're going to drop a name, you've got to include enough gruesome detail to hold a reader's interest. Otherwise, it's just another paragraph to plow through (or skip).

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