...je voudrais etre la tour...

i) Christopher Reeve has passed away. I am so sad to hear that - I had always hoped that he would do what he dreamed, to oversome his paralysis. Do you find recently, or have you ever found, that there is too much death around you? For me, it seems that lately, all my childhood movie heroes are passing away. Walter Matthau, Marlon Brando, Rodney Dangerfield, now Christopher Reeve. I cried for Jack Lemmon.

ii) I finally finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Morrell. I want to sit down with Susanna Clarke and why she wrote such a pointless novel. I had such great hopes - the Harry Potter for adults, they said. It wasn't. Sorry to disappoint, but despite being veiled in 800 pages of verbose mystical ramblings, really it just amounts to a more complicated than usual love story having, in the true nature of ridiculous romance novels, a somewhat happy ending that could go either way. Bittersweet. You know? So frustrated - that's 800 essentially wasted pages that could have been spent reading Foucault's Pendulum, Paris 1919 or Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (these being the three books that await me at the moment). When Farnam allows, The Alchemist will be added to this list.

iii) The extent to which I am cold cannot even be described. It is a good chunk into October and our furnace is still off. I am going to call the landlord tomorrow, and I will bitch. Useless greedy miscreant. I want to threaten him with legal action. Can this be done? Do you understand that he does NOTHING that he says he will do, or that is written in our lease. I need a legal advisor. Alright? Alright.

iv) Even my fingers are cold.