Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Reading/Listening,Exercise, TV Show, Apartment, No Poker

Reading: Still Novakovich. I should note that I did take a lengthy hiatus from the book because I found an unfinished Sudoku book while unpacking. Three of them, actually. They irritate the hell out of me. I motor through the medium difficulty puzzles but get fatally stuck on every single difficult one. Being the bastion of patience that I am, I usually just cheat and move on, but then I feel bad about cheating, get frustrated with the whole damn thing and stash the books again for awhile. In the last two days I've cranked out about sixty pages in Novakovich, so I should be done sometime this week.

Listening: Baumer. Sort of. I found them on Pandora when listening to groups similar to the Teddybears, but have been unable to locate them in a store. And by store I mean the one Best Buy I happened to be in for another reason when I remembered that I wanted to buy the Baumer CD. I haven't really looked for the CD, but I've been listening repeatedly to the thirty-second clips on iTunes. Screw you don't judge me.

I got back from the workout room about ten minutes ago. It is now 3:23am. I put exercise off for as long as I possibly could today. I don't know why I still hate doing it because I do feel good afterward. Physically I feel like garbage, but I know that it will get easier as I stay with it. Mentally, I have a real sense of accomplishment. I did something, and I know I did because I'm sore and tired. I'm starting to understand why my dad has always liked physical labor over everything else. He grew up in the 1950s when blue collar workers were admired. He's never quite accepted that the fast buck is all that most people admire today. As I age, I can't blame him, even though I still want piles of easy money myself.

I've gotten hooked on the show No Reservations starring Anthony Bourdain. I mention this because while the show is good, the monologues and insights that Bourdain adds in after the shoot are incredibly beautiful. He has a robust vocabulary and, despite my anger at the terribleness of The Bobby Gold Stories, his prose tickles the ear in an incredibly delightful way. Top off the beautiful lines with what I think is an interesting and pleasing voice, and I find myself with a sort of mystified feeling every time I watch the show. I guess the point of this section is to say watch the show.

I made a significant dent in the remaining move-in tasks today. My sister and I put together the bookshelf that I bought (and by I, I mean my parents) and I loaded it up with books. I own too many books. I love it. By my estimation, I own somewhere near 150 books, only half of which I have read. There is quite a large chunk of my collection that I have started reading and stopped for whatever reason, but those stay on the "Not Read" shelves. Yeah, I divide my books up "Have Read" and "Not Read," and both of them are alphabetized by author, sub-alphabetized by title. Yeah, I'm super anal when it comes to my books. You can tell the books that I've purchased myself because they still look brand new. The ones with bent spines and faded covers are books that other people have given to me. I'm not as OCD with my movies or CDs, which I probably should be, because as I unpacked I realized that I'm missing probably twenty DVDs. I know they're lurking at my old house somewhere, but I'm NOT looking forward to playing "does this belong to James or myself?" Aside from the piles of books that are now organized, my sister put up curtains (that she bought, I was sort of anti-curtain, but her paying made it a no-brainer), we hung a gigantic "Aum" sheet that I got in India, and then my sister made me rearrange every piece of furniture in my room because she didn't like it. All I really have left are about four boxes of crap that I need to sort through, most of which is probably getting thrown away. It is time to condense my life. It is time to go to bed.

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