May 7th, 2001.  Monday

 

    Added some more pictures to the San Francisco trip page.  better pictures than mine.

    Feeling a little sick the past few days.  It's too cold, and it's feeling like early fall instead of mid-spring.  Plus, i was wandering around the Upper West Side today, which isn't something I've done a lot since I worked at Parks in the fall.  On the whole, a package of unpleasantness.

    The day started late, as I was trying to sleep away my cold, to minimum effect.  After watching Doug on Nickelodeon whilst eating my broccoli and cheddar Rice-a-Roni, I went into the city to register for my graduation this Wednesday. How very exciting.  I suppose I should be excited, but it's all sort of anticlimactic.  I suppose I'm more nervous than anything.  because I'll be showing up without any career or job or nuthin.  My parents are coming too.  Which should be a good mix of pleasant and unpleasant.  I'm hoping that this month will be the first month in recent and not so recent memory that my parents won't have to loan me any money.  this is only a possibility because I should be getting tax refund soon.  If I don't have a job by June, I'm moving back to PA.  There's no way I can keep this going.
    Anyway, then I met Caryn on the Lower East Side to look at apartments.  Man, was that depressing.  Really small places for really big prices.  A studio for 1500. A one bedroom for 2200.  On the Lower East Side.  Christ.  On the way to the apartment, I had to mail a check to AT&T, and I stopped at a mailbox on Houston St.  by luck, a guy was standing there with a collection box, so he told me to just drop my envelope in his box. So I did.  I got about 3 steps away, when I felt compelled to turn around and ask "You are a really Post Office employee, aren't you?"  He looked startled, and laughed and said yes, and pointed to the little emblem in on his shirt.  The people he was talking to at the convenience store thought that was hilarious.  I yelled that there was no cash in the envelope, just in case though.

    So right after that, my brother Geoff called and asked me go to check out an apartment on the Upper West Side that he was thinking about living in next year.  I had nothing else to do, so i said sure, as long as he reimbursed me for the cab ride.  So I goes up there, and there's no one there.  So I sat around for about 3 minutes, tried the buzzed again.  Then I walked over about 100 feet to Columbus, then walked back to the apartment building, then rang the buzzer again.  No one answered again.  "Hmmm... this is puzzling..." I thought.  Actually, i said "What the fuck?"  So I called Jen, she living on the upper west, but no answer. By this time I really needed to go number 1, so I walked over to the Barnes and Noble on 66th and urinated, then thumbed through a few magazines.  then I decided I needed a new book. I finally finished Paris to the Moon, which i really like a lot.  Good writing and good reporting.  The last few chapters in particular were really impressive. Rodzilla recommended the book to me in February, and said that it reminded her of my writing in a lot of places.  And by the end of the book, I could see what she was talking about.  A tad more sophisticated than my prose, but a lot of the same basic techniques.  I think if i were ever to write a book, it'd have to be like this one.  A memoir, broken into little stories.  that I could handle. Anyway, i was really impressed with the book.  I was more impressed when i read that the author wrote the article on American Culture in the last two editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  I don't know why I find that so impressive.  It seems so official.  No one ever really thinks about the people who actually write the encyclopedias.  The first time I ever noticed was while perusing our 1989 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia and noticing that John Thompson, basketball coach at Georgetown, had written the article on basketball. I thought that was really cool. i real live person that I could associate the article with.  Anyway, I don't think you can do much better on the respect level than to be asked to write something for an encyclopedia.  That's pretty much saying you know your shit pretty well.  Well enough to have it be THE reference source for anybody who wants to learn about it.  That's way cool.  To me, anyway.

    Anyhow, the book i bought is called Sputnik Sweetheart, by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.  I thought I'd read a book of his in my Japanese lit course in college, but upon further inspection I got the name mixed up with Lady Murasaki, who wrote The Tale of Genji, which i did read.  I can't keep all these weird Asian names straight. Anyway, I do remember liking a shockingly large amount of the things we had to read for that class, and I think it was the only class I ever got a straight-up A in.  For that reason, in fact, I asked that professor to write me a recommendation to grad school, even though that was the only class I ever had with her.  she also taught Japanese, and I heard she asked my Chinese teacher about me, since she didn't really know me that well.  Reportedly, when asked "what's he like?" my Chinese teacher replied "He's lazy!"  He was a sort of cantankerous old man who smoked pipes, and I like to imagine him saying "he's lazy!" out of the side of his mouth while he was smoking a big pipe.  Anyway, i had a chance to read that recommendation last year, and I have to say it was a really fair and glowing report.  She did say she only had one class with me, but she wrote an amazing amount of praise despite that.  Looking back, I'd say that was the one class that really taught me how to read.  Too bad it came in the second term of my senior year in college.
    So, back to the book, I'd read some good reviews of Murakami's two new books on the plane from NY to Las Vegas and also on the plane from San Francisco to New York.  I couldn't decided which to buy. His other book out is a non-fiction book, about the gas bombings in the Tokyo Subway in 1995.  It looked like a really good piece of reporting.  The book I bought was fiction on the romantic and mysterious side.  I figured I'd just read a reporting book, and I'm trying to be a better reader and writer, so I went with the fiction.  I'd read a bit of it on the train home, and I really like it so far.  It'll be a quick read I reckon. I really need to read more.  Cos I need to write better.  I need to do a lot of things.  I should probably be keeping some kind of list or something.

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