Thursday, May 20, 2004

We are now the proud owners of a bottle of Bactine. For knee scrapes on the playground. Not our knees: Calliope's. I don't run on asphalt anymore.

Ruby told me this and I was submerged in a mini-rush of nostalgia, which conflated Mercurochrome (which is now banned, I understand), rich, lurid red stains on my boo-boos (which is part of Calliope's lexicon), Bactine, and of all things Ovaltine, which I used to use as an ice cream topping. I think perhaps the -tine suffix gives words a cheerful, antiseptic quality. Perhaps we could solve the problems of adolescents worldwide just by calling them "tineagers."

My memory is the junk drawer of my life. I think that's why I like dollhouses so much. It is easy to furnish a life from scraps.

I haven't updated my reading: Dear me! I finished the SAMS Javascript book. It didn't improve my abortive javascript skills in any way at all. I seem to have this weird thing about passing values.

Reading: Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchet. I have been meaning to read Discworld for awhile. My favorite GM in college was very strongly influenced by him. Ruby adores him. Though the Witch books are my favorite, I liked this one. Vimes, Carrot, and Nobbes are a funny little trio in themselves, a little model of all the types of goodness in the human soul: reflexive, studied, and self preserving. I would recommend him to people who don't like fantasy, if only because he tells stories about mundane feelings using comical folkloric images.

Detroit: I do Mind Dying by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. This is a funny little book I've had sitting on my shelf forever. It's largely about Black union struggles in Detroit in the late sixties and early seventies. A little too serious for my tastes, and I was fully prepared to put it down if it was boring. But it's not: It's casual and engaging. I think what's really interesting me is that it extends my knowledge of Detroit, a city that I grew up around. I also keep imagining how my grandfather must have reacted to the events depicted therein (was he retired, yet?). I'm sure I don't really want to know, but it is strangely stimulating to think about.

ALA. FCC. PC Magazine. Who cares about any of that, though?

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