Archive for March, 2009
Bad Week
Forecast
This is your weekly week forecast where we forecast the week weekly. All things considered, it looks like a busy and possibly bad week ahead. Let’s go over to the play-by-play breakdown.
Monday will be a long day saddled with worries about all the remaining days of the week. Indeed, it’s just starting and you’re worried about tests and test results, projects and projections. What’s more, today you’ll have a lab session and after the session, you’ll have to take care of the lab report. A great way to start the week!
Tuesday will be the day you remind yourself of how you messed up your math test, and with each passing minute, the knot that is your gut will twist tighter and tighter, until the moment arrives and you look upon the disgusting result in your hands. Then you’ll dust your shoulders, break into a smile and leave it behind you. Hopefully.
Wednesday! Some respite! Except that there’s a project presentation and a test in the next day!
Thursday will be a storm. There will be lightning and rumbles of thunder and the waves will be choppy but you’ll hope you can ride it out as you always do, because the next day is…
Friday. Thank goodness. It’ll be a pretty long day, but you don’t really care, because the weekend is knocking on your door and you just want to say yes.
Then the weekend comes and flies by and it’s time for it to start all over again.
Enjoy the week, dear sir!
…
Ah, nothing like the scent of a new week.
Why? Just… Why?
I sometimes wonder why I’ve been going through law essays like it’s my own work. But then I think that things like that are for people important to me and it all becomes not-so-silly.
Although, I keep thinking, if I mess it up for them, it would really, really make me feel profoundly disgusted with myself.
Book Surveys
Every time I finish a book I have trouble deciding on what to read next. If I’m not struck by a bolt of inspiration quickly enough, I normally survey my friends. This usually consists of giving them a list of candidates (of which they’re mostly not very likely to know) and then asking them to pick whichever appeals to them based on title or author.
There’s usually a winner after a few people (indefinite number of them), but I realise also that I don’t usually read the winning book. Instead I pick something else and leave the winning book for a month down the road, two months, three. I think the polling just helps me figure out which I really want to read next.
Or maybe I’m just not very good at listening to people.
d
Friday Loot Report
Shopping!
Apart from my mom’s birthday present, I bought these when I was out yesterday:
- Selected Poems 1908-1969, Ezra Pound
- Death At Intervals, José Saramago
- Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
- The Way Through Doors, Jesse Ball
- The Paris Review Interviews, vol. III, Edited by Philip Gourevitch
I wanted to buy more, but poetry is expensive. In particular, Ezra Pound was 45 bucks before the discount. I had before that set my sights on some noir, notably a luxurious James M. Cain volume, but I really couldn’t spare the cash.
I was also looking for some essays for a friend. Found nothing.
I saw The Story Of Forgetting, which is one of those books I thought I’d try without finding too much about, but I had to drop that too because I saw The Way Through Doors and I had heard about it somewhere and it was also one of those I thought I’d try without finding too much about.
Otherwise, I’m quite happy to welcome The Paris Review Interviews into my library and even happier to expand my poetry collection. I saw this Dryden volume that looked lovely, but it was too much poetry for a day, really.
And my third Saramago book. Rather eager to get started on it, but… so many others in line…
d
Not Quite Goodbye, Mario
Too Loud
The new cat (named Mario… did I tell you?) found a new home yesterday, and left us in the night night. I was going to tell you this:
Hope he settles in well there. I’m sure it’ll be fine. And I’ll hopefully be visiting him every now and then.
But in any case, hope you enjoyed your stay here, Mario.
Then he came back. Because he was too loud for them. Well, it’s true that he does have a particularly loud voice. I think he basically couldn’t adapt, especially with the prospective owner’s cats, so it was best for him to come back anyway. Welcome back, Mario.
Too Many Ideas
Sometimes, you just get too many ideas, to the point of you struggling to write them down. The problem with this is you’ll never use half of them anyway, and if you tried, you’d only be doing yourself a disservice. The truth is, with these sorts of things, most of the ideas that turn up are nonsense ideas anyway, but you just keep thinking that for every hundred of these, there’s going to be at least one. There must be one.
School
Boring as it is to talk about these same things over and over again (well, but it is a journal), school has been rather remarkably busy these days. There’s still a test or two to deal with, some lab sessions and a project thing that I’ll be grappling with this week.
Tastes Change
I kind of have a feeling I wrote this down somewhere before, but I’ll just guess that it wasn’t here. I read Atonement not too far back, about a couple of weeks ago, and the funny thing is, I’d read it all before a few years, and the effect it produced on the two occasions was completely different. Back then, I absolutely adored it, but it’s been more of a calm respect for the novel in my most recent outing. In fact, I struggled to get into it at first. There was just a sense of alienation that I couldn’t quite put a finger to. I think it can only be attributed to a change in my tastes in books. I mean, it does sound like a perfectly reasonable thing, but now that I’ve actually experienced it first-hand, I can’t quite shake the tingles, as if something’s not quite right.
Funny sensation, this.
d
“Yeah yeah yeah…”
Monday Morning
Some work done over the weekend, not enough work done over the weekend, you know, the usual story. It’s been a pretty hectic week, I suppose, and it’s not looking like it’ll let up any time soon, but at least I can still breathe. I also managed to help out a couple of folks, and the response I got from them was just smashing. So in all, it’s not been too bad a week, and maybe we can keep that momentum going this week.
On The Menu
I want to do some math this week, some signals, and work on that project I’m meant to be doing. I want to write too, but it’s not proving easy to throw myself back into something that’s been left alone for quite a bit of time. I spend more time looking at (other people’s) essays these days, so that’s been put aside for the time being. Unfortunately.
And really, I think I should be doing something other than work during the course of this week. We’ll see how that works out.
Bookstore
It’s a bookstore weekend, and I’ll either be dropping by at Kinokuniya on Thursday or Friday. I’m looking at some poetry, a couple of (now-in-paperback) novels and a bit of an essay thing for someone else. Does anyone need anything?
Librairie de France…
…is closing. [via The Elegant Variation]
Does whatever a spider can…
For some reason, I came across this: Marvel are putting up episodes of the old Japanese Spider-Man television series, and here’s the first one. [via Marvel.com]
I actually like it better than the movies.
d
Your Inner Fish
The best science books to me are like adventure stories. By that I mean they’re capable of enthralling and inspiring in the sort of way that you would normally associate with an adventure. Your Inner Fish is one such book.
In this book, Neil Shubin provides a remarkable look at the evolution of the human body, tracing our evolutionary history to fish, to worms and to pond scum. It is a tale that bounces from fossil-hunting to genetic experiments, guided by Shubin’s assured narrative. His is a voice that is simple and enthused (and sometimes wryly funny), and it turns out to be perfect to lead the reader (versed in natural history or not) through this magnificent story.
The biggest problem with trying to advertise science books is that some people tend to think that it’s not for them. I know plenty of people like this. They feel like they won’t get it, or they won’t be interested anyway. Which is probably true significant fraction of the time. But then you think that a good one comes along and they’ll miss it because they’ve already decided that science books are all not for them, and it’s a little sad.
Is Your Inner Fish like that? I think it requires a little bit of interest in the body and in evolution. If you always wanted to know the use of fossils in modern science, this is a good place to look. If you wanted to understand the close relationship our biological lineage has with the animals around us, this is perfect for you. If you really have no interest in all of these things and asphyxiate at the sight of science, then, no, this isn’t for you.
Does it require a great amount of biological knowledge? I don’t think so, though I’m not the most objective judge of this since it is in some ways closely tied to my major. Clearly, you’ll have to know the basics, such as that DNA is our heriditary material, but I think it’ll be all right if that’s where the boundary of your biology knowledge ends. Shubin does a wonderful job of simplifying things to a level that I think most people will be able to appreciate easily. (It’s certainly helped by his use of metaphors and the lovely diagrams that punctuate the pages.)
What’s to be found is a rewarding and compelling story, the story of you and me and all the other little humans on this planet. It’s the story of how fish came to walk and how worms grew heads. It’s the story of why t hiccups and hernia. It’s the story of a naturalist and his marvellous exuberance.
So, at the risk of being laughed or groaned at by the people who insist it’s not going to be for them, I’m just going to say, give it a shot. Give it one chance. Keep an open mind. Let it just take you for a spin, a little adventure. Just this once. (Okay, until the next time.)
d
