To follow up
yesterday's ramble... I ended up going to get a frozen pizza, baking it, and eating half while drinking two full glasses of semi-fine red wine. It wasn't great pizza, or shiraz, but they meshed nicely, and motivated me enough to turn away from the computer and put on a DVD for the first time in weeks. It was the first time my TV had been on since early October, in fact. I haven't bought a new DVD since 2006, more out of non-desire than any desire to budget or deny myself, so I just stuck in Bourne Identity 2, and enjoyed the first hour of that smart action thriller. At that point my viewing was temporarily interrupted by a phone call, and I answered it to speak to my mom.
She was calling to congratulate me on my email notifying her that I'd passed the math CLEP and was actually done with college and had successfully earned my degree. It was an interesting conversation, since we talked for about 5 minutes, and it all felt normal and typical to me, and yet she seemed ready to get off the phone. And at that point I realized that I was drunk, or at least pretty thoroughly-tipsy, and that it must be affecting my personality, since my mom never wants to end one of our phone calls that quickly into the affair.
I don't believe I'd ever (previously) talked to my mom before while drunk. That's not a real surprise since I've only been drunk about half a dozen times in my life, and never with my mom (a couple of times with dad on wine tastings, two or three times with Malaya when we were doing shots for fun or Scrabble success, and a few times alone, most of them within the last year of post-breakup aloneness and occasional loneliness and often school stress) around. But neither she nor I have much patience with drunks, especially not trying to talk to them, and since she'd asked me what I was up to, and I'd admitted to the pizza and vino, she wasn't trying to guess what was my major malfunction. She knew, and it was probably obvious, though I don't think my rambling verbal stories were any much different than they usually were. Still, if you can't get sloshed the day you clear the last hurdle between you and your degree, after a long and very work-filled semester, when can you? Though admittedly, there should be more warm beer and keg stands involved.
Today's been more of a usual day, though it began rather late since yesterday's non-sleep and math test study stress combined with warm covers, a cold room, and no weekend deadlines to let me sleep for almost 10 hours, or about 4 more than usual. I didn't regret it a bit, either. I did wander around aimlessly in the
morning afternoon, but some leftover pizza and caffeine got me on track, and I set to work cleaning and vacuuming and moving furniture. I'd grown tired of the arrangement of my apartment over the past year, and with school finished with and seven or eight months of non-academic work awaiting, I wanted to change things around. The hope is that my mental state will reflect the physical condition of my domicile, so I moved everything around. My desk went over to the side wall, turning 90 degrees in the process, a bookshelf switched walls, the TV moved to where my desk o used to be, and my Ikea futon/couch also turned 90 degrees, to face the TV across a much less yawning chasm than it previously spanned.
None of this means anything to anyone other than the half dozen or so readers who have actually seen my apartment, but the objective was to shake up my working environment, while also making the apt a bit more accessible to other people. So my desk no longer squats in the center of the room, the couch has open space in front of it and is near the open space kitchen/dining area, the TV is close enough to the couch that it could be used to comfortably watch a movie, (ideally a female someone I could put my arm around) etc. It's by no stretch of the imagination a "bachelor pad," but it was never intended to be. I do hope it's a bit more welcoming to some potential, largely-hypothetical female guest, and that it'll help me work more and be more focused on things I should be focused on. Slightly cryptic though that statement might be.
As of yet, it's neither of those things. In fact it's make me feel rather sideways. I suspect the floor in this cheap apartment is slightly concave, since I feel a bit like I'm falling downhill to my left. It's been 11 months, but I have vague recollections of feeling like I was falling to my right when I set up my desk and chair in their former position. Since my left now is towards the center of the room, which was formerly to my right, that's evidence of the floor sagging, or at least evidence that my delusions are consistently delusional. In the final analysis it doesn't matter if i feel crooked because the floor is, or because I'm delusional. In either event, I can take comfort in the fact that the same thing happened back in January, and I got used to it after a few days, thus have cause to hope I'll do the same now.
Even though I'm sideways.
One welcome benefit of all the rearranging was that I had to turn my bookcase 90 degrees as well, which rendered everything on it... backwards. It's one of those Ikea bookcases made up of multiple small square compartments, so there's not back on the back; in fact,it can be used as a sort of room divider if you so desire, turning the back into a second front. I'm using the second front now, but not the room divider since my apt is far too small for such activities. I had to turn all my books around once I moved the bookcase, but that was okay since it gave me an excuse to pull most of them out and rearrange and organize them.
I did so, packing the good stuff together by author and theme, stacking together all my leftover college books that the bookstore wouldn't buy back at even their insulting "pennies on the dollar" rates, (it's always fun to sell them a used book for $2.50, then walk over and see the same book on sale "used" for $14.50) and generally condensing my holdings to free up more cubbyholes for non-book storage in the 4x4 array. There's something soothing about sorting and arranging and putting disparate objects to rights. As evidenced by the popularity of various "collecting" hobbies, most of which require/allow their collectors to spend far more time arranging and sorting and fussing over their collected items than would be tolerated in any other circumstances outside of a mental ward.
I was surprised by one thing though; the sheer amount of books I own that I've never read. None of them were purchases, but Malaya and me haunted various library book giveaways during our time together, and at almost every such event I obtained half a dozen titles that I never got around to reading. Malaya sorted through all of our joint books when we split up and I moved out, and quite generously packed me off with every book of even slightly dubious provenance.
So now I have two full cubbyholes of books I've never read, most of them by authors I have, at best, a passing familiarity with. The prime example of this is are the four titles by Stephen Donaldson. Hardcovers of "Forbidden Knowledge" and "The Lost Story" and paperbacks of "Lord Fool's Bane" and "The One Tree." I don't recall picking any of those from the endless rows of cardboard boxes, and yet here they are. Worse yet, I've got no idea who the author is. His name sounded familiar, but I think I was confusing him with famously hawk-faced television journalist
Sam Donaldson. However, I don't believe that other S. Donaldson is an author, and if he is I wouldn't be moved to read his work. Even for free.
The author Donaldson is not a writer I'm familiar with (at least not yet) but looking at
his offerings on Amazon I see a fair number of fantasy-looking titles. None of the ones I have here look much like fantasy from their covers, but most likely I, or perhaps Malaya, had in the past seen his other titles with Merlin-looking dudes on the front, and the name bubbled up when we saw it in the stacks at the book giveaways.
Other noteworthy books include "Jian," by Eric Van Lustbader. I've never read anything by him, but he's got one of those names you never forget once you hear it. I'm not sure if it's a good name, or not, for an author? It's certainly memorable, and not just because we share a first name and middle initial, but it's outrageously fake, even if it's his given name. It's a better name for a male porn star than a novelist, though I guess we can be thankful it's not "Lustbladder" or worse, "Lustbatter," which would
really be porn-centric.
Another author I've long meant to try out is Terry Goodkind. He's the author of
The Sword of Truth, one of the most popular fantasy series going, and is blessed with a memorable last name, and at least in this book, the 1994 hardcover "Temple of the Winds," an absolute LOL gem of an author photo. He looks like a younger, pony-tailed version of General Zod, the bad guy in Superman II. Intentionally, I assume. You see the shot here, assuming it didn't make your eyes water so badly that you had to close your browser and give up on reading the rest of this potentially-neverending blog entry.
Goodkind's intense posing presents the best/worst example, but a very common theme in these library freebies, most of them published between from 1965-1985, are their awful author photos. It's not real surprising; no one becomes a novelist because they were so good looking that they grew weary of the constant demands of modeling agencies, and most people look pretty stupid in any photo more than 20, but less than 50, years old. But still. Dude! I think the key, demonstrated conversely by Senior Goodkind here, is to not try so hard. You wrote a book. No, it's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's not exactly an unheard of achievement. Just pose. Be Mr. Serious Writer Man if you can't bring yourself to smile or have bad teeth, but don't be a douche bag. And that goes double for authors of cheap pulpy fantasy/sci-fi/mystery, which sums up most of the books I looked through today. I shouldn't complain, though. The time capsules of clothing choices, hair styles, and silly poses were almost worth the price of the books by themselves. Which were um... free.
Labels: apartment, drinking, writing
