Expensive but worth it

Time for me to renew that membership. It's really amazing, but $18 a pop now!

(Our home computer is dying a slow and painful death, making it difficult for me to get online and post stuff lately. And now that I am, this is all I can think of to write!)

Quote for the day

Thinking back on it, this evening, with my heart and my stomach all like jelly, I have finally concluded, maybe that’s what life is about: there is a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never.

--From The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

My inner two-year-old

My cousin had her (second) baby this week and named her Lucy, one of my favorite names in the world.

M. Defarge's brother had a job interview in Cambridge on Monday and may be moving to (or near) Boston, my favorite place in the world.

Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever grow up and learn to share. Even when it's things that don't belong to me, like names or cities. I don't need them or can't have them, but I don't want other people to have them either.

New Cup II

One of my favorite coworkers is looking for a new apartment. Her landlord is selling hers, so she and her husband have been scouting out new locations in various city neighborhoods. They're both in their mid-thirties, no kids, with jobs that I have to assume pay reasonably well. But to hear her tell it, they're both hopeless with money--their cable is always getting shut off because they forget to pay the bill, or they're putting off getting their car fixed until the next payday.

Today she stopped in looking like she'd run a marathon. They found an apartment that they love, and they're in the process of getting together the application. She had all the requisite forms and account numbers, but they didn't have enough money for the application fee. To be precise, they were nine dollars short. Prior to coming to work, she had been digging through couch cushions and in old coat pockets trying to make up the difference, but no luck.

The fault for this latest financial catastrophe, she says, is her husband's. His method of bill-paying apparently involves getting tired of random balances and paying them off, regardless of the effects on the total financial picture. He mailed off a check to a credit card company that resulted in their checking account being overdrawn, which resulted in a hold being placed on their ($25) savings account, which left them $9 short of the application fee with four days to go until payday. She said she'd exhausted every legal means of raising cash that she could come up with.

Sympathetic soul that I am, I said, "Do you watch "Flight of the Conchords"?, and suggested male prostitution as a possible solution. Then I gave her ten dollars from my wallet. I felt a little weird offering her money--I didn't want to embarrass or patronize her--but she accepted it gratefully.

Math has never been my strong point, and I know I'm lucky to have M. Defarge and his pharmacist's salary to pay the bills with, but I just can't imagine living paycheck to paycheck in quite this fashion. Even in my single, pre-$25K salary days, I never had to resort to the couch cushions to make ends meet. I feel a little spoiled today, but kind of like a grown-up too.

Winter may be over after all

Farmer's market season in the Loop began this week. Obviously there's not much there yet, but it was still a welcome sign that summer is on its way. Working at a school where "summer" begins the first week of May, I've pretty much given up on spring. The weather seems to have given up on below-freezing temps (although I'm waiting a couple more weeks to plant anything), so we may have turned the corner.

It was mostly plants, baked goods, and cheese today, but I did buy some asparagus and leeks to make soup. It's a new recipe, so we'll see how it turns out--I didn't have great luck when I experimented with potato-leek soup in the past. Now I'm just counting the minutes until the fruit starts coming in. I measure the summer in fruit seasons rather than months--strawberries, then blueberries, then peaches, then apples and school begins again. My grandma sent some rhubarb home with my mom the other day that's waiting in my freezer for strawberries to arrive.

In honor of the season I broke out one of the jars of strawberry-rosemary jam that's been languishing in my freezer since last summer. I don't think it was supposed to be frozen for that long, but it seems okay--at least food poisoning hasn't set in yet. This year I'm going to make the ginger-peach, provided I can keep from eating the peaches long enough to cook them.

Maybe this will ease the transition

Lost generation. Heh.

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences.

--From Robert Lanham's Internet Age Writing and Course Syllabus