![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
abandon hope all ye who enter here
Friday, 7 November 2008 12:32 pmFunny old thing, life. Spent a maddening evening on Wednesday tottering around Exclusive Books trying to make a book club selection. I'd shot myself neatly in both feet by actually being prepared for this, having spent the last three months lovingly accumulating a list of about 20 potentially interesting tomes I'd seen recommended on odd corners of the 'net. In keeping with the usual mainstream ethos of our largest bookstore chain, I was able to locate precisely two of them. A third appeared on the system, but twenty minutes of searching, in tandem with a bemused but willing shop assistant, rendered us unable to locate it in the giant, unalphabetised piles of new arrivals. The rest were unknown to the database.
Annoyed, I abandoned all attempt to be balanced, fair or reasonable in my selection, and simply grabbed a whole bunch of stuff I personally wanted to read. This resulted in unanticipated shrieks of glee and happiness from the assembled magpie flock of Tea Readers last night, and proved my most successful selection ever. So, bugger all that judicious, thoughtful stuff. Next time I'd take in a handful of darts and chuck them wildly with my eyes closed, except that the experience also left me with the inculcated belief that everyone in the world and his incontinent tapir is, in fact, encouraged by the publishing business to fling down a few words in random juxtaposition and publish the result. Great frelling Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua, but there's some tripe out there.
My poor little kitty (Golux of the Pink Nose) is back at the vet's today, having her nose froze, or at least those bits of it which appear to be ulcerating as a result of the Unrelenting Fierceness of the African Sun. Hopefully we're zotting it in time before it spreads to the basal cell layer and turns into cancer proper. Damned pink nose, its cute is a delusion and a snare. When I dropped her off yesterday I sat down in the vet's waiting room and promptly had his half-grown golden retriever rush happily up to me, all bouncy, lolloping dog-happiness and blissful "I don't care if you're not a dog person, I'm a people dog!" assumptions, and proceed to grab a handful of my skirt in his mouth and stand there, holding it lovingly, until the vet and assistant more or less crowbarred him off about ten minutes later. Crazy oral-fixated hound. Cat nose-freezing episodes are traumatic enough without giant patches of drool in the region of my right kneecap.
In the Department of Things I Have Recently Used To Distract Myself From Work: The Weekly comes highly recommended in the area of random inexplicability. Perpetrated, of course, by the man who is guilty of Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About, featuring a relationship built on crazed disagreement for something like sixteen years. Also, John Scalzi's advice to Obama from sf presidents is amusing, particularly the Deep Impact lesson. ("Be Morgan Freeman").
Annoyed, I abandoned all attempt to be balanced, fair or reasonable in my selection, and simply grabbed a whole bunch of stuff I personally wanted to read. This resulted in unanticipated shrieks of glee and happiness from the assembled magpie flock of Tea Readers last night, and proved my most successful selection ever. So, bugger all that judicious, thoughtful stuff. Next time I'd take in a handful of darts and chuck them wildly with my eyes closed, except that the experience also left me with the inculcated belief that everyone in the world and his incontinent tapir is, in fact, encouraged by the publishing business to fling down a few words in random juxtaposition and publish the result. Great frelling Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua, but there's some tripe out there.
My poor little kitty (Golux of the Pink Nose) is back at the vet's today, having her nose froze, or at least those bits of it which appear to be ulcerating as a result of the Unrelenting Fierceness of the African Sun. Hopefully we're zotting it in time before it spreads to the basal cell layer and turns into cancer proper. Damned pink nose, its cute is a delusion and a snare. When I dropped her off yesterday I sat down in the vet's waiting room and promptly had his half-grown golden retriever rush happily up to me, all bouncy, lolloping dog-happiness and blissful "I don't care if you're not a dog person, I'm a people dog!" assumptions, and proceed to grab a handful of my skirt in his mouth and stand there, holding it lovingly, until the vet and assistant more or less crowbarred him off about ten minutes later. Crazy oral-fixated hound. Cat nose-freezing episodes are traumatic enough without giant patches of drool in the region of my right kneecap.
In the Department of Things I Have Recently Used To Distract Myself From Work: The Weekly comes highly recommended in the area of random inexplicability. Perpetrated, of course, by the man who is guilty of Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About, featuring a relationship built on crazed disagreement for something like sixteen years. Also, John Scalzi's advice to Obama from sf presidents is amusing, particularly the Deep Impact lesson. ("Be Morgan Freeman").
