Flowers and Olive Oil

2012 Book Count #1

Kru — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 04:38:36 +0000

1. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk. Different ending. Better than the movie.

Eating Out of a Dumpster

Kru — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:48:55 +0000

So, at least for right now, I am not broke. To signify this transition, I have stopped getting food out of my local food pantry. I can now no longer justify getting free food from there that other people are paying for when I am perfectly capable of paying for it myself. However, in a completely coincidental turn of events, I saw a documentary the other day about dumpster diving (about which I had become intrigued because I pulled a duffel bag out of my rich White neighborhood dumpster a few days before), and this has converted me to a semi-freegan. That is, at least part of my regular diet for the foreseeable future will be pulled out of a dumpster. So far I have eaten raspberry Greek yogurt and a bag full of shrimp. I live right next to a grocery store. I work right next to a different grocery store. Neither store locks their dumpsters. So far the thing that I have found most interesting about my two excursions to date is how much I would have paid for the food I’ve eaten if I had bought it. I never eat shrimp normally because holy eff, that stuff’s not cheap. And I buy cheap store brand yogurt. So it’s very possible I will start eating better out of a dumpster than I did out of my wallet.

Actually, this reminds me of something I heard on NPR a long time ago when they were interviewing Michael Pollan about his new book, In Defense of Food. He said that “food” (which he defines somewhat more strictly than people do normally) generally has one interesting characteristic that edible non-food does not: it rots. So, by this rule of thumb, a Twinkie is not food, but a tomato or a roast beef is. It occurs to me that food I am likely to pull out of a dumpster is much more likely to be FOOD than the stuff I normally buy, because I buy box pasta and that’s not going to expire until 2017 or something ridiculous, whereas the expiration date on the yogurt I had last night was January 10, 2012 (note that it was already in the trash January 5). So I wonder if I will also be eating higher quality, in addition to higher cost, thanks to this new-found foodventure. I also wonder how much I will save on my grocery budget.

Being an Addict

Kru — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 05:12:32 +0000

Hello. My name is Kru, and I am an addict.

The other day I was watching a television show in which one of the characters is an alcoholic who has been sober for several years. However, when another character learns this, she asks “You were an alcoholic?” to which the first character replies, “No. I am an alcoholic. And I always will be.” I have heard this view expressed before, but I sort of assumed that it was an exaggeration, used to make sure that people steered clear in bounds due to fear of a single misstep. Now admittedly, I figure there have to be some things that once you quit, you aren’t nagged by them anymore. But I used to think that most things fell into that category, and now I am realizing probably a great deal more than I previously thought falls into the same category as alcoholism.

For example, I am more than seven months sober, the longest I have ever been sober since I was a teenager, but I’m not an alcoholic. I am a pornography addict. And it is still difficult for me. Just today I was struck by the fact that I know exactly where to get the drug I want the most. The exact location, and what will be found there. Also by the abundance of it. I figure, let’s say you’re addicted to heroin and you move to a new town out in the boonies of Montana or whatever. Maybe (granted, I know nothing about rural Montana) you could make acquiring heroin difficult for yourself by moving to a place where the supply is low and/or difficult to ferret out. But for alcohol, for cigarettes, for pornography, there is no place to run. There are industries out there hunting you down. You could buy stock in them.

It’s hard. But I’ve made it seven months, and I can tell you that one of the biggest helps recently has been not wanting to lose the streak. I just wanted to tell someone. Thanks for listening.

Book Count #35 and #36.

Kru — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:45:38 +0000

35 and 36. Catching Fire and Mockingjay, both by Suzanne Collins. Here is what I think happened after Suzanne Collins finished writing The Hunger Games. I think she sat down at a table and said, “Okay, now I think I will write about 400 more pages of stuff pretty similar to what I just wrote, and then spend the next 400 after that defacating over everything.”

On the plus side, “The Hanging Tree” is an excellent poem. On the downside, it and all symbols used in this book (like President Snow’s use of poison to kill his enemies) are explained IN THE BOOK. Oh, and major spoiler here, but almost everybody and their sister, including Primrose Everdeen, dies. And Katniss turns fairly evil, voting in favor of one final hunger games in which the Capitol’s children will be forced to die. So yeah. Eff this book.

Book Count #32-34. Also, On Friendship.

Kru — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 06:09:14 +0000

32. 100 Things You Aren’t Supposed to Know, by Russ Kick. This book is as conspiratorial as it sounds. Various organizations are trying to keep various things quiet, but buried deep within public and long-forgotten records are confessions, admissions, records of mishaps to ensure never happen again. Honestly, I can’t remember that many of the things the book told me about. And I can tell you that some of them (though I don’t know how many) are not that well researched and have exaggerated implications. But I do love their complete debunking of the myth that Freud was in any way useful to his patients.

33. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. Excellent book. A long one, but very very good. Told from the perspective of two black maids, Minny and Aibileen, and one aspiring white journalist, Eugenia (more commonly “Miss Skeeter”), the story is about writing an exposé in Jackson, Mississippi, about what it is like to be a black maid working for a white family. There is a worthy opponent, Miss Hilly Holbrook, and a star-crossed love object, Stuart Whitworth, and a list of rules for black maids to avoid getting fired, like “No sass mouthing,” and my personal favorite, “It’s nobody’s business.” I have been told by several people that the movie is good, and that it adheres closely to the book. I have even been told by one person that it is better than the book because it is funnier. Eh, read it, I say.

34. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. In post-war, post-natural-disaster North America, now known as Panem, the centralized and ridiculously oppressive government in the Capitol stifles potential rebellions on the part of the twelve more remote districts by reminding them every year of their weakness and helplessness. To do this, they take two children from each district and enter them into a gladiatoresque fight to the death. And if they do not kill each other, their deaths in the arena will be arranged by the Gamemakers, who will release wild animals, or cut off the water supply, or any number of other things until there is only one person left (who, incidentally, will receive fame, fortune, and provisions for their starving districtmates). The main character Katniss Everdeen (They all have stupid names. It’s the future. You get used to it… kinda.) volunteers to enter the battle, known as the Hunger Games, in order to spare her younger sister from having to go. The other child from her district is a boy who has a crush on her. It may sound trite, and admittedly a lot of the book reads like it was designed around being great for the big screen, but in with the drama is actually a good number of important themes, like maintaining your own will while coerced as a kind of rebellion, or schadenfreude as a form of entertainment, and artificially established class inequality. I’m reading the second one now, which so far is a more flamboyant version of the first one, with much more focus on political unrest. Not as good, but I’m still having a hard time putting it down.

Completely unrelated: So, I had a sex dream last night about a character on Glee. Yup. And in a much-less-creepy-than-it-sounds way, it got me thinking about relationships that I have let more or less dissolve, and that this is a habit of mine I wish I fought harder against. I wish I were still as close to Rebecca, Tanner, Leah, Chris, Claire, Emma, Heidi and Dallas as I used to be. And I wasn’t even that close to Heidi or Dallas at the time, but I know I could have gotten closer to them, and I wish I had taken the opportunity. And I wish I would have gotten closer to Elle, Julie, Amy, Justin, several Andersians, and Aaron while I was at it. And this summer, Trevor, Troy, Jeb and Jordan for sure. I need to get better at friendship.

…I wonder how many of the above are on Twitter? It’s a shallow connection, I know, but now I’m in a different state and I’ve never been great at friendship anyway, so it’s a start.

Book Count #30 and #31

Kru — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 03:38:23 +0000

30. Looking for Alaska, by John Green. Rather than actually reviewing this, I will be copying and pasting a discussion I had about the book with a friend over Facebook. Here ’tis. WARNING: Spoilers. Lots of them.

Friend: What did you think of the end of Paper Towns?
Me: liked it. Overall the book was kind of Looking for Alaska 2.0 with one fewer death, but I really liked that there was this big knight in shining armor theme and then nobody got together not because any external force was keeping them apart but because they realized it was a bad idea. I also enjoyed the reference to The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the much less subtle reference to Moby-Dick by means of a great white wall of cow.
Friend: I found the pace of the book a little confusing; the beginning and end were so fast and the middle so slow. I suppose the author did that intentionally to highlight Q’s frustration and determination. I liked too how Q and Margo decided that this wasn’t the right time for them. To me that seemed like one of the only mature decisions made in the book.
Me: Yes and no. On the one hand I think everyone is supposed to be immature in order to give Q this kind of chaotic world which he has to deal with and work from. I was, like most people, I’m sure, struck in the face by the final encounter with Margo about how she largely WAS just thinking of herself, and how even if she was just trying to get away, she still chose to go out “with a bang” and also mess with people’s heads, which was really, well, crappy of her to do. I think Q is mature. Yes, the 77mph chase seems a bit rash, but acting in the face of what was a really legitimate concern, I applaud his passion in trying to prevent her suicide. True, he was partially motivated by infatuation, but throughout the book we see that he’s not *blindly* in love with Margo. He does realize that he doesn’t even know who she is, and while that doesn’t mean he can’t have feelings for her, it does help him keep things at least somewhat in perspective. When Margo confronts him saying his desire was only to rescue the damsel in distress, he tells her she is wrong and he tells us as the readers that his response is mostly true. So we can see that he is trying to do the right thing first and make the feelings come second. I think one of his main motivations is that he feels duty bound. Yes, it is naive to say that finding Margo must become his responsibility and oh by the way I’m not going to share any of these clues with Missing Persons, but to be fair, Q looks around and for the most part he sees a world that doesn’t give a care about Margo or her disappearance at all, or nothing more than “What a crying shame. Oh look, prom shoes” and I think he feels a lot of indignation that humans just DON’T look out for one another and he is out to, partly, reconcile some of that.

By the way, Anonymous Friend above is awesome. If you know her, or if you are her, consider yourself blessed.

31. Also Known as Rowan Pohi, by Ralph Fletcher. I really enjoyed the premise of this book, creating a person on paper and then choosing to live as that person because life is better for him than for you, but I felt that the conflicts created by this choice were taken care of too easily in the book. I mean, yes, there is a reason presented in the end for why he is allowed to get away with it, but ehhh I was less than convinced. However, that’s probably because the book was written for 13-year-olds. If I were thirteen, this book would likely have been fine and in fact, if you know a thirteen year old boy, I recommend this book for him.

Book Count #29

Kru — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 19:53:10 +0000

This is a Book, by Demetri Martin. This is a link to This is a Book, by Demetri Martin. This is a book review, by Kru. The book is very similar to his style when he performs live, so if you’ve ever seen a show of his and thought he was funny, you’ll like the book, too. I thought a lot of it was very clever. Just like his routines, though, some of it was more awkward than laugh out loud funny, although I did also laugh out loud, more than once. For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Martin does mostly observational humor and funny drawings, which also appear in the book. This is the end of the book review. What’s that over there?

Book Count #28

Kru — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 07:50:27 +0000

28. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky. The filming for the movie adaptation finished earlier this year, for release in 2012. Mr. Chbosky was the writer for the screen adaptation, so hopefully it isn’t a complete disgrace the way the Incendiary movie was, because the book was brilliant. Also, the book mentions a significant number of other books, as well as songs and TV shows and artists. This theme is so prominent, there is a list of them all on the Wikipedia page. I read this book in a day. Seriously, read it. Also, go out and tell the person whom you love that you love them.

Experience and Status as Earthly Treasures. Also, Book Count #27

Kru — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 06:15:59 +0000

The sermon today was largely about trusting God. One of the points brought up was “What have you done in the past week that other people would look at and say, ‘That person was really trusting God right there’?” When we don’t trust God, we make our own plans. But that’s proud because it’s saying our plans are wiser and more realistic than God’s, but really, whose thoughts are higher than whose here? So one of the take-home messages today was that it is prideful to set out to do anything God hasn’t called you to do.

I gave this one a good think. Anything God hasn’t called you to do? But there are these things called adiaphora. Adiaphora are things for which God has not made a ruling (and presumably does not care) one way or the other about. The Bible charges members of the church body not to quarrel with each other about such things. So for example, should the church purchase the blue carpet or the green carpet? Should I eat carrots or raisins with lunch? Should I cheer on the Cyclones or the Hawkeyes? God doesn’t care; please stop fighting about it. But wait, if God doesn’t care, then He hasn’t called me to do anything. So does that mean we should purchase neither carpet? Eat neither side dish? Support neither team? I mean, I don’t think God is ever really going to spell out what my weekly menu should be, but He does want me to eat. There are no Biblical calls to fast permanently until you starve. So… it must not be that prideful to make the decision yourself to eat the raisins, buy the green, and support the Cyclones or whatever.

I might not have given this one so thorough a thinking had it not been for a feeling of conviction I got as I was hearing it. I am excellent at justifying my actions, sadly, and often when I hear something that strikes a cord in me, I break out the logic to see how much of my current lifestyle is defensible (probably with the [sub]conscious hope that not much will need to be changed). I got this feeling regarding two things: 1) fund raising for my trip to Africa to help Jonathan’s House for Orphans, and 2) tackling my to-read list. So I asked God to show me if there was a different way for me to be raising the money for my trip than my current plan (read: tithing for real, raking leaves, other odd jobs, sending out a mailer), and as a matter of fact an idea came up today so we’re going to try that out. Keep your eyes peeled for ambigram merchandise.

And then I thought about my constant reading of books. For those unaware, since high school I have had a list of 100 books to read before I die. This is that list:

The Holy Bible
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes
Ulysses, James Joyce
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Selected Plays and Poems, William Shakespeare
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
1984, George Orwell
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
Selected Tales and Poems, Edgar Allen Poe
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
The Trial, Franz Kafka
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Göthe
Aeneid, Virgil
Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann
Gargantuan and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
Iliad, Homer
Odyssey, Homer
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Old Goriot, Honoré de Balzac
Metamorphoses, Ovid
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
Tragedies, Sophocles
Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Thomas Hardy
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
The Ambassadors, Henry James
The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Stern
The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
The Red and the Black, Stendhal
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Gilgamesh
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, père
Plays, Henrik Ibsen
Medea, Euripides
Emma, Jane Austen
Fairy Tales and Stories, Hans Christian Andersen
Plays, Anton Chekhov
Essays, Michel de Montaigne
Parallel Lives, Plutarch
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
Pensées, Blaise Pascal
Candide, Voltaire
Phèdre, Jean Racine
The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis
Blindness, José Saramago
The Sound of the Mountain, Yasunari Kawabata
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, Denis Diderot
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy

Why these 100 books, you ask? Well, basically so that I can say I have read them. These are supposed to be some of the greatest books ever written, but I wasn’t really choosing to read them for the enjoyment of it. I mean, I have enjoyed several of these books –Blindness? downright amazing–, but others I slogged through, only continuing to read them because they were on the list. Wuthering Heights? Terrible. Season of Migration to the North? What. The. Frak. I mean, it wasn’t a bad book, I guess, but wtf plots are you weaving together here? Your womanizing Doppelgänger fled to Sudan from England after murdering mid-coitus the seductress who (no joke) intentionally seduced and angered him so that he would kill her while they were having sex, and now you as the narrator feel compelled to intentionally decide you aren’t going to be the same guy even though you have now inadvertently killed your Doppelgänger’s widow because you didn’t heed her threats to commit suicide if you didn’t marry her? I repeat: What. The. Frak. Now, there’s an extent to which it is useful to read classics because if other people have read them and make allusions to them, now you will be able to understand. Or if a book has historical significance, reading it can help you understand what was going on in history. My old college professor who taught my Bible courses said this was a reason to read the Bible, even for non-Christians. The Book, after all, has probably had more historical impact than any other, maybe even more than all the others combined. Other classics… no one is going to be making allusions to them, and they are never going to be brought up in a context of historical significance in any way meaningful for my life. I mean, no one that I know has ever even mentioned the book Lord Jim to me. I own it. I haven’t read it. No idea what it’s about except I’m fairly certain someone gets thrown overboard in it. So for books like these (and really, for nearly all the books on that list) the main reason I’m reading them is to mark another notch on my bookshelf, so to speak. It’s a matter of pride. Of status seeking. And it’s a status I already have, for Pete’s sake! I’m not going to read these books and suddenly become a member of the Literati. There’s no entrance exam. I’ve read 27 books so far this year, most of them not on this list at all, and guess what? I’m a freaking member of the literati Right Now. Great new books are constantly being published. If I try to be the absolute best reader ever, it’s simply never going to happen. There will always be books I haven’t read, especially at my speed. But I don’t need to be on top of the publishing world to be recognized as a smart guy. Most people (I think it’s the glasses) consider me smart within the first 10 minutes of real conversation with me. No reason to keep hunting for a title here. I have better things to do.

So do I stop reading books? Certainly not. It’s something I love to do, and I don’t think God gave me this love for no reason. But now it’s like I have given myself (or God has given me) permission to read books for reasons other than “being a good reader.” God hasn’t called me to being a good reader. He has called me to being a good Christian. That means loving people, connecting with them, feeling compassion and taking action to help them. So from now on I read books for different reasons. I can read books that people recommend to me or have read because it will enable me to connect with them. I can read books to help me understand people, to enrich my faith, to inspire me to action, or for any number of reasons. But to build up a list of completed books? That’s not good enough for me. That list is a list of earthly treasures. Completing those all is nearly the same as filling a treasure chest with 100 experiences that I cannot take with me when I die. Okay, not exactly 100 because the Bible and other useful books are on the list, but you get the idea. I have no reason to build up treasures in my temporary life.

This does not mean I will no longer be making book count posts. I mean, the original plan was to count how many I read in a year and then restart the numbering every January 1. Maybe I will just stop numbering them when 2012 rolls around. The real point was that I will still be making posts of book reviews. No longer as a means to brag or anything, but as another means of connection. If you want to read some of the same books I have read and have a chat with me about them, wonderful. Let’s have fellowship together. In that light,

27. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, by David Sedaris. This is the second book of his that I have read (the other was Me Talk Pretty One Day), and I did like this book better. To be honest I picked it up because it was on display and I was caught by the cover illustration of a squirrel and a chipmunk on a candlelit dinner date. Neither book, however, left me feeling that great about the state of humankind. And Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk doesn’t even have that many humans in it. It’s all short stories featuring animals with shockingly real human emotions. If you are only going to read one of the stories in it, read “The Faithful Setter.” It’s profound, unsettling and pessimistic, like nearly all the stories therein, so it’s representative in that way but definitely this was a favorite (if you can call it that, because it left me feeling UGH) of mine. Overall, not a book for people who need their endings happy or their illustrations wholesome.

Book Count #25-26. Also, Saddam

Kru — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 04:28:28 +0000

25. Looking for Alaska, by John Green. I like this author. You can see that I read his (and David Levithan’s) book Will Grayson, Will Grayson as Book #12 this year (though don’t bother looking up the blog post about it). I have also read his book An Abundance of Katherines and hope to read more of his in the future. Yes, his books are for teenagers, but they still cover important themes like Alaska) mourning, self-blame for death, teen sexuality, the afterlife, life as suffering; Katherines) what to do with unreached/stagnant potential, the feeling of not being special, the dynamics and [un]predictability of human relationships; and Grayson) responsibilities to friends, anger/betrayal, depression and its effects on (teen, gay) romance. This book was good. There was quite a lot of mischief going on in the book, what with all the underage drinking/smoking/sex/pornography/miscellaneous pranks, and a book so full of characters making decisions the opposite of anything resembling what I would do tends to prevent me from getting super attached to any of them, and I can’t really say that Alaska was a book where I related to anyone (well, slightly to Pudge), but the characters were still thoughtful and I enjoyed the philosophy of it all. Also, on a more personal note, I really liked the short info about the woman who wanted to destroy both Heaven and Hell so people would love God for Who He Is, not for what He will do with them upon their death.

26. Room, by Emma Donoghue. Notice that this is one of three books by women I have read this year. That’s 12% women, 88% men… and two out of those three women authors are Jane Austen, where the heroine gets married and lives happily ever after in the end. This does not make me a good feminist. Room, on the other hand, is about a woman and her son who are held captive in an 11×11 room, and who have been there since before the child was born. The mother has been there seven years; the boy Jack is now five and has never known anything else. In fact, he has grown up thinking that Room is the whole world and Outside is only Outer Space, God (and possibly Baby Jesus), and Old Nick who brings them groceries and Sundaytreat and makes the bed creak and the door go beep beep at night when he is asleep in Wardrobe. The book is told entirely from Jack’s perspective… except that he IS a reliable narrator, which is odd considering he is five, but I think the author made a fantastic choice in doing this. Consequently his narration is all in childspeak but all other characters talk normally. He even relates his mother correcting him to say “brought” instead of “brung,” even though he still says “brung” in later narration. He asks a lot of questions to the reader about stuff he does not understand and makes poignant observations and overall is a very powerful voice. The author does an excellent job making the book realistic and meaningful. I will say that reading this book did cause me to feel a little bit claustrophobic about my life. I mean, in the beginning the two characters do the same things every week because they have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, whereas I do the same things every week because– because why? So I got out of the house and took walks and raked leaves. I saw a deer and an owl right up close and I felt a lot better.

Speaking of doing things I don’t normally do, I made a friend on Wednesday. I was getting overwhelmed by reading Room and, being done for the day, was going to put it back on the display when I paused to look over the books in the psychology aisle on my way. After lingering for a second, I am approached by a similar-aged man whose name is Saddam and we talk about his love for psychology and mine for psych/sociology, our mutual love of books and our vastly different reading speeds, our philosophies of what a “successful” life means. We recommend books to each other. We exchange phone numbers. We are hanging out over coffee tomorrow. Saddam is a highly motivated man who as a child immigrated from a country (yet unidentified) that limited free access to books. He now reads mountains of books all the time. That is, when not working for his self-owned technological business (I don’t understand what it is, to be honest, but I think it has to do either with consulting with networking sites or programming networking interfaces?) for which he did not go to college. Nor did he go for anything else (because of the financial impact, I believe), but he’s still obviously brilliant. Due to general social ineptitude I have no idea whatsoever how tomorrow is going to go, but I’m living outside of Room and trying new things. Let’s do this.