Books!

I dragged a mountain of books down to the library downtown. The strike's finally over so it felt good to get rid of them. Over the summer I got into the habit of walking there over lunch and either taking out or taking back a book, but inevitably I ended up with a lot of library books all over my livingroom. I went to renew a couple one day, only to find out that one had been requested by someone else and would not renew, so the day they were due I walked down to the library only to find a picket line around it.

Just as well. I wasn't finished reading the book at the time. But by now that poor person has been waiting for that book since July, so I kind of felt like I should return it sooner rather than later.

I brought home a new mountain of books for my papers but I was surprised to find that the VPL really doesn't seem to have many books on Afghanistan and its culture and I'm not sure why. Just like I don't understand why Canada doesn't have any form of world-renowned expert on Afghanistan and we're fighting a war there. You'd think that if we were spending a lot of money and lives getting tangled up in a foreign conflict we'd want to make an effort to learn something about the place and the people but apparently not.

But that's not what my paper's about at all. Just dialogue and communication, paradigm and concepts of place and time. Same old same old.

I picked up another book that looks like it would be useful for another course too: The Elephant in the Room, Silence and Denial in Everyday Life by Eviatar Zerubavel. I was looking for something completely different at the time and by complete coincidence his name jumped out at me. I need to squeeze 20 pages out of my family's systematic forgetting of illegitimate children, divorces and mixed-race relationships and it should help. I'm trying to track down an article by Hallbwachs for the same paper and I'm not finding it all that easily.

I find the problem with the library checkout is that I end up walking away from the counter with a huge armfull of books and there never seems to be a discrete, graceful way of transferring them to my bag. How do other people do this? I never see them having this problem.

I crouched, took off my backpack, put my stack of books on the floor and began to load them. It was then that I caught sight of a familiar looking shoe. I looked up and found myself staring right into the eyes of a guy I have a class with and for a brief second he looked at me as if I was completely retarded as he was walking out with another guy.

He really shouldn't stare, not with those tight hipster jeans of his not when they really accentuate the flabbiness of his inner thighs.