Monday, May 17, 2010

My room is now cleaner than it has been in over 4 years. The massive amount of crap that has been slowly pushing me out of my own abode has been defeated, for a time, until by my fatal neglect allows its inevitable return.

Work has started scheduling hours again and I am anticipating a paycheck fatter than $50 again. This is a good thing. I already miss the spare time, but only to a degree, and God willing things will keep moving forward and all this halting and waiting is in the past.

Work itself is the usual. The books and the co-workers make it constantly enjoyable, and I still learn new things from the various customers that come in looking for this and that. Because of our proximity to Princeton we get every sort of reader, from every corner of the earth. It's a good job for the Observer. The only thing that gets on my nerves are the people who collect half a shelf of magazines, sit down with their cheap latte for 4 hours straight flipping through everything, and then wander away without even closing the last thing they read, or even worse, dump their magazines in front of other magazines in the stacks as far from where they belong as possible, as if somehow this will wipe their bookstore karma for next time. Nope. If I ever procure the power to kill with my mind, you fuckers are the first to go.

I'm undecided about whether or not I'll destroy the kids who come in and study out of our test books for the entire day without even considering purchase. One the one hand they waste our time and our space and never put the books back. On the other hand those things are kind of expensive, and become useless after the test has been taken. On the super secret third hand, libraries exist for a reason. I think I'll destroy them too.

My book reading has crawled to a halt with Adams. I need more of an education on America in the 1800s than I have to get much out of it, so for the most part all of his references fly over my head. Without the context The Education of Henry Adams is not much more than a guy saying stuff like, "I went to France and kind of wasted my time there. Then I went to England and didn't do much there either." What actually happened, if anything, is hard to pick out.

I commit hyperbole here, but even the introduction is an apology for Adams being so "allusive" and "obscure", so I'm not off by much.