things

I recently converted the swastika that was graffitied on one of the columns of my front stoop into the Chinese word for field. 田 is much nicer to look at than the backward swastika. Are all white supremacists too stupid to realize the windmill is supposed to roll to the right? Or perhaps there are some Buddhist taggers in my neighborhood.

This is a portion of an email that R.K. sent me today: "hi. i hope you're not crying. i just read your most recent blogpost and feel the burning in my nose and eyes which is about as close to actual crying as i get. i guess this is empathy?" The question mark is my favorite part of the whole email.

I spent a lot of time laying in my bathtub yesterday finishing up The Tattooed Soldier, and getting distracted and thinking about the lyrics "When you were young and your heart was an open book" (from Live and Let Die) and "If I took all the girls I knew when I was single, and put them all together in one room, I know they'd never match my sweet imagination" (from Kodachrome). I like that from this line you can tell exactly the kind of lonely, nerdy asshole Paul Simon must have been when he was a boy and how it carried over even when he became a successful man.

Willa Cather is one of my favorite novelists, I decided. There is so much love in her writing it makes my teeth hurt. I started My Antonia today and was crying by the 35th page from the toothache. So much beauty it could choke a horse.

I've forgotten everything I once thought I knew about the law - I stared at the Westlaw start page for a few moments today trying to remember what button it was you were supposed to depress with your little hand icon to get you to the right page where you could put things in parentheses and have other things pop up - so I decided to subscribe to the Economist, Harper's, and the Atlantic Monthly, none of which have anything to do with remembering how to be a lawyer. I guess I am also concerned that I have forgotten how to be a citizen, because I stopped caring about the news when Barbri started and have recently only been skimming Politico and Pollster once in a while to see if Barack's numbers have fallen further. C.P.'s blog is actually helping me on this front, because she's so smart and filled with outrage and she links to interesting important stories about injustice. I am too lazy to go about finding the right links myself. Please continue to post, C.P.

Now I am going to stop by the Renegade Craft Fair and buy some useless shit made from repurposed garbage and see if Mahjongg, a cowbell-heavy band that I saw at the Knitting Factory seven million years ago, is still playing. And then I will go to the used bookstore and buy some more books, because I've already read all the books I bought there five days ago. Reading is not a good substitute for cable TV, I decided, because there is no library nearby and I am spending about $40 a week on books. Cable is cheaper and you get to see Rachel Ray's bazooms, which are much more interesting to look at than to read about.

Things I have seen at Starbucks today: a man using two new straws to stir sugar into his iced tea, then throwing away both of those straws, and unwrapping a new one to use for drinking. A woman yapping into her cell phone: "But I'm IN Starbucks! At Division and Paulina! Is there another one here? (A woman on a cell phone emerges from around the corner.) OH MY GOD THERE YOU ARE!" A woman and a man are examining scraps of fabric clasped in a three-ring binder, and another woman is saying to them: "If you wanted to go with a Renaissance theme for the wedding, I would look at some of these jewel tones..."

OH LORD. THE MODERN CONDITION.