a thing I'm reading

David Foster Wallace is damn good. I'm reading Oblivion right now, and every story captures a little bit of the scatter-shot process of thoughts, as well as the elusive nature of our abstract thoughts when we try to pin them down and put them into words.

He writes the way you think. Or the way you wish you thought. Or, often, the way you really hope you don't think but deep down inside know you sometimes do, and you're kind of glad someone else thinks this way and wrote it down but you're also trying to distance yourself, in your mind, from that kind of thinking and so you also feel superior to the person who admits to thinking like that.

I have realized some people find his habit of using run-on sentences or run-on thoughts hard to read. I just find myself marvelling at what he's able to do with words.

a public service announcement

A comment left let me know apparently someone is following this blog
- not even I'm doing that. But for those that are interested: if you
want to read about my travels in New Zealand, do it here

news from a home

I have received troubling word from Hattiesburg, Mississippi:

The End Zone is now charging $1.50 for a draft beer.

i heart letters to the editor

It must be fun to be on the letters staff of a large newspaper. In
the last two days Wellington's paper, the Dominion Post, has
published a letter from a man wondering why more attention wasn't
being given to smoking as a preventative step/cure for the Bird Flu,
because many of the front-line solders in World War I smoked and
dealt with victims of the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, "and to
the best of my knowledge none of them died."
The day before, a rather irate reader wrote in to ask why the paper
perpetrated the myth of the American moon landing by publishing a
photo purportedly of the moon taken by the Apollo 17 crew.
"Such a myth might have been useful in protecting western
civilisation with Soviet technology might have been seen to be
superior, but those days are gone."

someday it'll happen

So I might have lost weight since being in New Zealand, but the other bad habit I expected to magically disappear here hasn't. Despite cigarettes costing NZ$11-12 a pack, I've still been smoking - but less than I did in Mississippi. The price and the smoking ban in bars contribute to an easing of the habit, but having a smoking flatmate and a number of smoking friends means I'm still just as much of a smoke mooch as ever.
Ah well.

it's my favorite kind of life

From a Morphine song:

Early to bed/early to rise

Makes a man or woman miss out on the nightlife.

a job

Actually got a job this week, one playing me $25 an hour to walk around and hand out information on a new bank card to businesses (more or less). Not horrible, but it's still the first time in ages I've had to actually be at work by 9 a.m. more than one day in a row.