Fragments

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--Stayed inside for most of this rainy, rainy, windswept, cold weekend. Clicking through the channels, I came across The Perfect Storm and the scene was so similar to what was going on outside that I thought for a moment that the television screen had momentarily been replaced by a window (and not in a metaphorical way). Then when the camera shifted from shots of the Nor'easter to shots inside the Andrea Gail, I realized that George Clooney and Marky Mark could not possibly be floating four stories above the ground, soaking wet and trying frantically to get my attention.

--Bad weekend with going off the medication. Do not know why this mood problem has hit two weeks after cutting my dosage of Zoloft in half, but I am convinced it has to do with the meds. I get extremely irritated and irritable about 45 minutes to an hour after taking it. I also realized that I am probably addicted to Ambien, which I have been taking because Zoloft is causing serious sleep problems. Of course I only "realized" this after Coco pointed out to me that "not being able to sleep without it = being addicted to it." And by the way, did Eminem really have to go to rehab for an Ambien addiction? Because I feel this is just so lame of a rehab excuse for a musician. What happened to the street cred of the heroin addiction?

--I feel bad for Meg Fuckwit, the better half of The Fuckwits, my yuppified craptastic downstairs neighbors. I heard her sobbing softly for over an hour today, after Hamilton Fuckwit had gone to work. Terrible.

--I really love Lucyrain's post about department/faculty events, which I would have responded to if I had not been attending one myself. "Hate" is not too strong a word. They sometimes really suck, my dear, and I always feel guilty and bitchy and anti-social and ungrateful for dreading them. I am so glad to be in good company in bitching about them.

--I am inspired by Dr. Crazy's post about the public library. As a child who moved around so much, I was always at home in the public library. "It" (of course there were many) became as stable a place as my grandmother's farm in Oklahoma. The smell and the feeling were pretty much the same in every town. I too have a long history of fines, which includes an enormous graduate-school fine forgiven after a lengthy e-mail debate between a librarian and me. She finally wrote, "I am forgiving your fine in the amount of $ xxx.xx, not because I think you are right but because I no longer have the time to correspond with you about this matter." The one thing I complained about to the Graduate Dean of Arts and Sciences in my exit interview after receiving my Ph.D. was the library's policies. They were changed within the semester. Victory! I love librarians and to this day feel obnoxious and guilty about the battle, but the policy was ridiculous and I really, really couldn't afford that fine. In any case, because of Crazy's post, I have been inspired to plan frequent walks to my public library (which is close) this summer. I will check out books of all kinds! I will rediscover the joys of pleasure reading! Of course, one summer when I was 12, I checked out and read an entire shelf of books on the history of Laos for no other reason than the shelf of books was there--in the young adult's reading section--and I did not really know anything about Laos. So who knows what I might decide I might decide to do with my library privileges. Whatever the case, I know quite a bit about Laos to this day and the idea of summer library walks and reading is really cheering me up.

--I do not think I have shared this guilty pleasure of mine with my blog readers yet. OK, here goes, I love watching QVC. I never buy anything. I never want to buy anything. I am never tempted, even when the grand narcissist of all inane narcissists, Jonathan (from the craptastic brilliance that is Blow Out), is selling his "product." I am simply mesmerized and contented and strangely lulled by the hosts' endless virtuosity with the banalities of consumerism. Am I right? Is it not a salve for the soul?