| Journal & Weblog | Write to Save Your Life | August 24, 2003 |
|
 |
posted Friday, August 22, 2003 » Can anyone offer a few tips on how to bake oatmeal cookies and not have them cool to the consistency of reinforced concrete? Comments: [7]
Unfolding August isn?t over and the leaves are already changing color. The weather?s still warm. I?m going to miss the summer when it starts snowing, but I still hurry into the embrace of air conditioned buildings (the transition is easier on the system than coming into dry furnace heat after a day in the cold). I met one of my professors, Jugal Kalita, for lunch at Mirch Masala. He was standing outside in a sharp blue shirt with his cell phone pressed to his ear when I drove up, listening to the voicemail I?d left only minutes before in response to his call. He thought I?d forgotten our plans. Since I missed a few lunch dates last week and the week before, I felt terribly guilty for making him think I wasn?t coming, but he greeted me with a smile and a quick handshake and made me leave my uninvited guest of guilt outside. He asked me about my life and my family. Everything was fine, I told him, and I explained how I was now living with Mike and was still working. He told me how he wanted me to help with the new university radio station and then we talked about Vigenere ciphers. Dad had surgery on his eyes this morning. They?re all puffed and bruised like he?s been in a fight, and I asked him if he wanted me to pick him up a steak at the supermarket. "You cooking?" he asked, and then added he didn?t need anything, just that he was glad I stopped by. On the way home I was thinking of the Time article on parallel universes and thought of an intriguing subject for a new book. Then I thought of possibly posting it here somewhere as I work on it, like Neale?s done with Dynamic Ribbon Device or Serial Text.
The Things We Carry The library in town is small and feels like my bedroom as a teenager, with books and shelves crammed wherever there?s space, which is probably why I feel most comfortable coming to this branch on my way to or from work. One day, as I was standing behind a woman in the checkout line, I glanced at the book in her hand and noticed it was entitled, "The Technology of Orgasm." Today, I walked to the grocery store behind our house, while bearing the weighty heat on my head. I thought of things like:
While choosing a card for Scott whose mother passed away two weeks ago, I noticed the elderly couple next to me had placed a 10-pack of sympathy cards in their cart.
» Tom at Plasticbag writes: At one stage while I was at University, I went through a bit of a phase of reading other people?s books on why they didn?t believe in ?god? either. These books were routinely extremely boring, because fundamentally the intellectual labour involved in making a highly convincing ?anti-god? case is so fundamentally trivial that it feels out of place in the mouths and books of scholars. Or at least that?s how it feels to me. Bertrand Russell?s Why I am not a Christian was one of those books. I read it to see if I could find a new way to translate the obviousness of atheism to the people I routinely found myself in argument with. But fundamentally, it was the same as everything else. Obvious. Self-explanatory. Tedious. Repetitive. I still, to this day, don?t understand why religious people just don?t seem to get it.
|
|
|
| Top |
|
Copyright © 1999-2003, Chrisonomicon |