'Bout frickin time

Once again I find myself penning one of those “sorry I haven’t done this in a while” blog posts. When restarting a blog there is always a dilemma; what should I lead off with? So much has happened in the past few months I simply don’t know what to choose: Battles with students and school bureaucracy? An increasingly desperate job hunt? Deaths in the family? Trips both to home and the West Coast? The kickball season that isn’t? Or just the mundane day-to-day observations of a man living in the pothole capitol of America. I thought I would share something that happened to me today…enjoy.

I haven’t been reading much lately. Which isn’t true of course, I do quite a bit of reading actually from student assignments to inane postings on Fark and A.net to the Sunday New York Times right down to the two magazines I actually have delivered to le masion. (The Nation and Entertainment Weekly, try wrapping your head around that combo!) What I mean to say is that I haven’t been reading many books, an exercise in intellectual slackitude that has left me feeling somewhat bland and, coming from a college-educated family, guilty.

So armed with the $100 Borders gift certificate I received for my birthday a few months back I pointed the kimchee-powered love machine into the wilds of suburbia in search of literary fulfillment. I spent three hours of a sunny Sunday afternoon perusing the shelves picking up biographies, alternative histories, short story collections, and novels by authors I had forgotten I had enjoyed. I found it amazing that such a left-leaning, god-denying, socialist such as myself did not own a copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, this was something I was determined to correct.

At the end of all this I had amassed two armloads full of dead trees and Happiness. (one of the titles I picked up) The total would well surpass the gift card that was now burning a hole in my wallet but I didn’t care, I was not just purchasing books, I was purchasing fulfillment. So finally my turn came and the lady behind the counter rang up my selections. I plunked down my Borders card and she looked at me as if I had just sprouted a second head.

I was at fucking Barnes & Noble!