Shopgirl

I read Shopgirl yesterday. All of it. It's pretty short. 130 pages or so.

It made me ache. Perhaps it was just my cold, but my chest felt heavy up and my throat contracted. I didn't have the urge to cry, though. Shopgirl was an easy, enjoyable read, and I felt like I could understand each of the characters. They made sense. They were real. However, that didn't make me like all of them. I'm sure I pulled a lot of personal grudges into my reading, as we all do with every book we read, but I just wanted to grab Mirabelle (the titular character) by the shoulders and shout, "run! Get away now!" But at the same time, of course I knew that even if she were real and I had yelled at her, she wouldn't have listened. These mistakes must just be something that girls of a certain age contend with, though, many girls I know have lucked out or just been smart enough to not get into these situations. Perhaps some of us are destined for this muck.

Anyway, it made me think about a time in my life I haven't thought about in a good while, and fortunately, I feel like I got some closure from this story. Flipping the last "page" in my Kindle felt like putting that part of my life in a box and putting the box up on a shelf in a closet I don't go in often. And I feel pretty good about that.

Thanks, Steve Martin.

An awesome video about gyros....

hello again

It's been a while, so here's a blog post.

I'm at my office with a substantial cold, waiting for materials to be emailed to me, so I can do businessy stuffs with them. Riveting.

Anyway, I'm reading these books that my brother told me to read about a thousand years ago, and I love them so far. They're called The Wheel of Time and they are by Robert Jordan (though later books in the series are by someone else, because Robert Jordan died, but I'm not to those books yet). I'm just on book two, The Great Hunt, but I get giddy as only a nerd can while reading it.

Basically, doom and gloom are gonna destroy the WHOLE WORLD, but there's this shepherd who isn't really who he thinks he is. He can save the world, but he's scared and there are a ton of  risks. He's gotta use magic (basically the force from Star Wars), and it's hella hard to control, and a bunch of people would frickin' kill him if they found out about it, and he could potentially accidentally kill everyone he knows and loves. There are creepy bad guys, pretty witch lady things, muscley dudes with swords, lots of horses, and this one guy who talks like a pirate. I love it.

the end.

January 14

• Paid credit card bills
• Subscribed to the Sunday NY Times
• 365 photo
• Wrote

January 13

• 365 photo
• Dinner with a friend
• Started learning a new skill set at work
• Updated budget

January 12

• 365 photo
• wrote for Academia Nuts
• Updated planner
• Hunted for a camera

January 10

• 365 photo
• Wrote
• Felt sick
• Attempted to buy a camera, but the one I wanted was sold out