a day in the life.

the thirty second introduction to me: i just graduated in may 2007, and at the beginning of oct, i moved with my friend and her cousin to a three bedroom apartment in the bronx. i work nine-five in an office job at a college on the east side of manhattan. my boss is crazy and the work is boring. so i try to have as much fun as i can in my non work time to make up for it.

this is my 23rd birthday – wednesday, october 31, 2007

stalled.

so dangerously the room mate and i ended up in union square yesterday. and if i’m in union square anyway – you can bet i will be swinging through the strand. i ended up with two more books. which i need in my life like things that i don’t need any more of.

however i was prompted to do buy these books in part because i have reached an interesting point; i am currently chapters away from finishing two books, the time traveler’s wife and the patron saint of liars.

i can not bear to bring myself to finish either of them, because once that happens they will both be over. i’m in love with the time traveler’s wife for many reasons. (henry is quickly moving up the ranks of favorite fictional boyfriends) and not finishing it allows me to savor it, keep it with me, and most importantly i would be crushed if it ended badly. normally i read very quickly, especially when i am enjoying something, and it’s not uncommon for me to blow through an two hundred page novel in two or three hours.  so maybe this is in compensation for that. and i want the characters to stay suspended as they are.

i’m not as in love with the patron st. of liars, but i like it. and i like ann patchett’s writing so much. i know that when i finish it there will be one less ann patchett book i have not read, and that saddens me greatly. as much as i love rereading it’s nothing like your first time. also why i have not even purchased her latest book, i’m going to try and hold out until i really need it.

the room mate thinks i am nuts. she’s even threatened to read both of them and spoil the endings for me. luckily i read much faster than her, and she has other books to keep her occupied.

does anyone else feel this way? or does the cheese stand alone?

note to self – think through moral issues

so a video in which protesters outside an abortion clinic are presented with the question:
how much jail time should a woman get for having an abortion?

seems to be a valid question, if you are protesting the legality of abortion. yet notice how none of these people have thought their position through. seriously no one. never took it to the next step. this almost gets embarrassing after a while. almost.

they have taken how they feel about abortion and extrapolated, and this blatantly illustrates that many of them are really concerned about religious issues / moral issues.

one of the many things the pro-choice movement seems powerless in doing on a larger scale is controlling the debate. and demonstrating that moral descisions are different from legal ones. which if it wasn’t obvious before, becomes pretty obvious after watching the video.

ann patchett in new york.

ann patchett is doing a “barnes and noble event” at the lincoln center barnes and noble this thursday.

remember how i love her writing more than life? and i think she’s amazing?

i was just reading the new york times review of her new book, and i was thinking to myself – i wonder if she is doing a book tour – so i go to check her website and bam. thursday night 7:30.

does anyone want to go with me? aka does anyone else love her as much and will be in the area? i don’t even know what she will be doing, but i assume maybe reading, answering questions and signing maybe? i don’t even know what i would say to her, clearly babble something at her like an idiot. but clearly, i’m going.

bel canto.

it’s not the book i thought it would be at the beginning. i love it all, but the roughest chapter is clearly the first one. what she’s setting up is not what you think she is setting up. nino’s reading it right now, and she was like “what’s with the political motivations, is it really as simple as stealing the president?” and i couldn’t say anything, because oh is that not the story ann patchett wants to tell. it has very little to do with political implications.

i actually got to the second to last chapter and stopped for a bit. i didn’t want it to end. i just wanted the leave the characters there, where they were. but then i had to finish it and know how it ended.

i love ann patchett eternally now. she has won my love. i would follow her to the ends of the earth i think.

it made me want to go listen to opera. but also the way she describes the opera is pretty much the same way i feel about amazing musical theater singers. it’s the same sort of beauty i think.

i do have this one paragraph which keeps haunting me, which could also be subtitled break my heart ann patchett;

her skin, the night, the grass, to be outside and then to be inside carmen.

he doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this. at the very moment he could have been taking her far away, he is pulling her closer. her hair is tangled around his neck. on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more. his fingers slip into the soft indentations between her ribs, the delicate gullies carved out by hunger. he feels her teeth, takes her tounge. carmen, carmen, carmen, carmen.

in the future, he will try and say her name enough, but he never can.

on beauty.

so last friday at the strand when i couldn’t find any of the books i was looking for, i happened upon a copy of on beauty, which while researching new books to read on amazon, i had come across the reviews for. all of the reviews i read on the book were amazing, although senior year of high school i had tried to read her other book, white teeth and got no where fast.

i’m glad i decided to give zadie smith another shot. everything that’s written about how amazing she is? fully deserved. the book is amazing and heartbreaking without necessarily being about anything in particular – it follows a family and as one review put it “one hell of a mid-life crisis.” the plot is secondary to her descriptions of these characters interacting with each other.

like every other page there was an amazing description of someone or something, which you hadn’t thought about that way before but is absolutely true, often with such unforgiving truth you wince. there is plenty about beauty of course, but there’s also a lot about love.

my favorite line, hands down bar none, and one that has stuck with me since reading it:

time is how you spend your love.

one of those things i’ve always felt to be true, but seemed incapable of fully expressing or articulating. something i tried at length to explain to one of my ex-boyfriends, and several friends who are bad about returning phone calls or emails.

the best way to express love is through time. it’s an attitude and approach i learned from my mother, to be honest. who every once in a while will as she says “just calling all the people i love.” this list is short and has included since i can remember, my father (though since he’s normally home it’s not much of a phone call) me, my brothers, her sister, and her parents. it’s the same mother who also always calls me when she is pumping gas at kroger’s because for some reason she always thinks of me there. she also sent me a card a day my freshman year of college, and a healthy amount the rest of the time. clearly there are degrees, and not everyone you love or care about has to receive that much of your time. but in the end time is how you spend your love.

truth and beauty

what she wanted was love, and the best way to go looking for it was through sex. but it never worked that way, and the sex just made her lonelier. i understood that, as it had made me lonelier too. i couldn’t ever remember being lonely before, certainly not in this way, until i had seen the edge of all the ways you could be with another person, which brought up all the myriad of ways that person could never be there for you.

- ann patchett, truth & beauty.

c did this program at smith over j-term, and they read this book. she was telling us about it. and probably cause i was the most receptive / thought i might actually read it, she gave me her copy and told me to read it. this is when i was up to my eye balls in thesis / regular course readings. and it sat on top of my fridge for a month or two, then got packed with the rest of my books. nino had requested some books, so when i was in ct i routed through my grandmother’s attic (aka my storage space), this book was sitting on top of some other ones and i grabbed it thinking i needed commuting books anyway. i started it this morning on the train. and it has consumed my day.

that quote has haunted me all day, mainly because it’s so beautiful and true.

it was also an interesting book to read while starting your first day at a job you need desperately to pay the bills but is painfully clear you are over qualified for. especially before they sort of “make it” – the narrator is working as a waitress and living with her mother. and talking about keeping her desire to write going. and it’s so damn palpable. i tried to read bel canto two summers ago and could never get started, but i love her writing so much here, maybe i will try again. and now j has recommended it to me and confirmed the hard to start beautiful at the end diagnosis.

i will end with one of my other favorite quotes from the book:

lucy’s loneliness was breathtaking in its enormity. if she emptied out grand central station and filled it with people she knew well, the people who loved her, there would be more than a hundred people there. but a hundred people in such a huge space just rattle around…you could pack in thousands and thousands more people, and still it wouldn’t feel full, not full enough to take up every square inch of her loneliness. lucy thought that all she needed was one person, the right person, and all the empty space would be taken away from her. but there was no one in the world who was big enough for that.

(i originally wrote this on 8.06.07 but i’m reposting here pretty much entirely. hence the first day of work reference)

a lifetime is not enough for books.

one of the benefits of commuting is lots of reading time.

this is an on-going list of the books i’ve read since july ‘07 [the approximate time i started working.] other book related thoughts will get their own posts as we go.

1. dune.
2. the fountainhead.
3. truth and beauty.
4. on beauty.
5. bel canto.
6. a man without a country.

the introduction.

twenty something.
female.
book worm.
broadway snob.
academic dork.
media whore.

and finally…a new yorker.